The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The lack of cheap labor for the sheep- and cattle-runs of Queensland had been apparent even before the gold rush. In January 1850, a son of one pastoral clan, the Leslies, reported to his father that they had held public meetings to ask the secretary of state for convicts, as “we must have more labor than Emigration will supply.… The Emigrants we get are the sweepings of the parish workhouses, not a bit more moral than the Exiles, and much lazier & independant; we ask for half & half Exiles & Emigrants, and if we do not get them we will send for Chinese.”13

  The issue split the Queenslanders, as it did the rest of white Australia: on one side, the squatters and pastoralists, wanting convicts; on the other, the free country workers, the clergy, the shopkeepers and almost everyone else from the town of Brisbane, agitating against the Stain and the Taint. But at the national level, the pastoralists were outnumbered. Although they could discount “unwashed” hands raised in their own woolsheds, they could not pretend that, in real political life, those hands were invisible.

  Everywhere else in Australia, with one exception, it was the same. Victoria was dead set against the Stain, and so was South Australia, which in December 1851 had sent its own petition to Lord Grey reminding him that the appearance of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land within its boundaries was ruining the morals of its people.

  The exception, of course, was Van Diemen’s Land itself. It had had no gold rush. It had not benefitted from immigration; few people wanted to start a new life in the colonial source of the Stain. Too many of the young, the hard-handed, the energetic and the ambitious had been sucked out of it by the gold rush. Van Diemen’s Land was an economic cripple; there, it was convictry or beggary, a point made over and over again by the pastoralists. The Anti-Transportation League could afford the luxuries of moral indignation and preach as it pleased—but the fact remained that every convict who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land was eagerly snapped up by the graziers. There was no waiting-list for convict servants in Hobart before mid-1851, but when 292 prisoners arrived on the Fairlie in mid-1852 there were 1,259 applications for their services.14

  Social prejudices remained, a “phalanx of antipathy,” as one Hobart paper called it in 1851, among landed gentry against convicts and Emancipists. Most employers would take a free worker over a convict one any time, given the choice. But they did not have the choice, because the free workers had gone to the diggings. Thus the oligarchs of land—such families as the O’Connors and Lords, the Bisdees and Talbots, the Headlams and Bayleys, who between them disposed of more than a quarter-million acres of the green sullen island—stolidly dispatched their petitions to London; one of these respectful memorials in defense of the plantation society was signed by 459 graziers and merchants.

  The Australasian Anti-Transportation League did not doubt the justice of its mission. Its letterhead was a flag with the Southern Cross and the extravagantly righteous motto In hoc signo vinces. These had been the words spoken in a dream to Constantine the Great, “In this sign you will conquer”; and under the aegis of the Cross, he had gone on to defeat the pagan armies of Maxentius at the Mulvian Bridge in 312 A.D. Likewise, the Leaguers intended to defeat what passed for Rome in Australia, the Colonial Office. The League’s rhetoric, its tub-thumping about defilement and the Stain, went down like cream in the other colonies—except among the descendants of Emancipists, who resignedly kept their peace when the adjectives rained on their fathers and grandfathers from the platforms of abolition. But the Vandemonians choked on it. Too many of them—perhaps four people out of five by 1850—were related to convicts on one or both sides of their lineage, and although this was a social embarrassment to be passed over, if possible, in silence, they did not want to listen to harangues on the extent of their own pollution. As a result, the League was obliged to pack the empty seats at its dinners in Hobart and Launceston with free tickets; Vandemonians did not want to pay good money to hear their parents insulted.15

  The battle between the League and the government of Van Diemen’s Land, over the issue of the unfair Convict’s Prevention Act that had been sponsored by the League’s branch in Victoria, inflamed a real class struggle in Hobart. Its theater was the campaign for the Van Diemen’s Land Legislature elections, due in January 1853, whose chief issues were the shift of responsibility to local, municipal government (which Denison favored) and the ending of transportation (which he opposed). The 1851 elections had been won by men sympathetic, in the main, to abolition—friends of the Australasian League. Could the Leaguers in Van Diemen’s Land repeat their victory?16

  One could not be sure. The Victorian Convicts’ Prevention Act had put them in an awkward bind. Many of them did not want to offend the Crown with a law that, in effect, denied the validity of conditional Royal pardons for convicts. It seemed, and was, a tyrannous statute, unfair to other Tasmanians. Sir William Denison’s government saw its perfect opportunity to reverse anti-transportation propaganda by depicting the Leaguers, through the government-aligned press, as reactionaries who wanted to keep conditionally pardoned convicts in permanent subjection, as oligarchs (“former merciless white slave drivers, and now newfangled Leaguers”) in liberals’ clothing.17 As the spring of 1852 gave way to the early Tasmanian summer, long-suppressed political emotions in Hobart boiled over in a way that recalled the bitter disputes of Emancipists and Exclusives in Sydney forty years before, in the time of Macquarie. All the euphemisms in which local political discourse had veiled the convict system and its class divisions were dropped, as Denison’s supporters found an alliance with the ex-convict interest against the League. Insults and propaganda flew. During the campaign, readers of government-sympathizing newspapers like the Guardian were switched to a diet of pro-Emancipist sentiments and even treated to surveys of Australian history in which the convicts emerged as the sole heroes. At meetings, speakers for the League were howled down by what one of the Leaguers’ journals, the Times, called “The Slumocracy,” which “the patronage of Sir William Denison raised … into vigor.” The Leaguers accused their lieutenant-governor of fomenting “a war of classes” and called his administration—in a bizarre foretaste of later political rhetoric—“the Red Republican Government of Van Diemen’s Land.”18 But when the votes were counted in January 1853, the tallies showed a heavy majority for Denison and the lower-class ex-convicts whose feelings he had adroitly manipulated.

  Nevertheless, the British Government did listen to the League, to critics at home and to the wealthier mainland colonies. It rebuked Denison for his “partiality” when he reported the election as a proof of his popularity. In England, the pressure to transport was slackening and, for the first time in living memory, there were actually vacant cells in government prisons at home. The government had built more jails in 1851, for instance, the grim commodious prison of Dartmoor opened, and a new jail had been built at Portsmouth to replace the crowded hulks. By 1852, there was prison space for 16,000 convicts in England.

  Prison was cheaper than transportation by now, at least for short sentences. It cost £100 to keep a man in Van Diemen’s Land for the run of his sentence, but prison in England cost the government £15 per man per year. Since only a small minority of British prisoners drew sentences of more than a year in home prisons (only 5,000, in all, between 1842 and 1850, as against 30,000 men and women transported for 7 to 10 years to Van Diemen’s Land in the same period), it was now feasible to reduce transportation by stepping up the length of sentences in English prisons. The penitentiary, for which Jeremy Bentham had beaten the philosophical drum so long and tiringly fifty years before, was clearly destined to replace Botany Bay.19

  In April 1850, Lord Grey rose in the House to make one of the last defenses of transportation. He still planned to send his Exiles out when and as they were needed. In fact, to assuage the northeastern graziers, he had dispatched two ships direct to Moreton Bay, Mount Stewart Elphinstone in May 1849 and Bangalore in January 1850; and as long as the Legislative Council of New South Wales was controlled by g
razing interests, he wanted to keep alive the option of sending felons there. Convicts had created the economic base that made free emigrants want to go to Australia—and 31,000 such emigrants had gone there in the last year. Grey conceded that “confinement and penal labour … ought to be chiefly inflicted at home,” and that “free colonies have a right to expect that convicts should not be sent to them without their own consent.” But he was not going to abandon transportation on principle—especially not to Van Diemen’s Land. The island had been founded as a penal colony; it had never had any other purpose. England had spent “millions” equipping it as a jail, and

  the free population which has established itself there for the sake of the pecuniary advantages of that expenditure, has no right whatever to expect that the policy of this country should be altered when they think proper to demand it, and that we should be compelled again to incur the heavy expense of preparing some new settlement.… I conceive that authority ought to be firmly maintained and asserted, and that Van Diemen’s Land should continue to be used for the reception of convicts.20

  Whatever the justice of Grey’s position—and justice it had, for all its lack of appeal to colonial feelings—his hopes (and the graziers’) were overridden by the gold discoveries of 1851. Gold was the mineral that put an end to transportation, because its discovery plucked off the last rags of terror that clung to the name of Australia. With a quarter of Britain, from navvies to viscounts, clamoring for tickets to the southern goldfields, who was to think that a trip to El Dorado at government expense constituted a fearful punishment—especially if, as rumor had it, convicts got a conditional pardon as soon as they stepped ashore at Hobart? As Governor-General Fitzroy remarked, “few English criminals … would not regard a free passage to the gold-fields via Hobart town as a great boon.”21

  There were still people who thought of convict labor as an economic panacea. But they were mostly cranks.22 The English press, led by the Times, was by now solidly against transportation. Grey had few allies in either house of Parliament, except for some of the more reactionary Law Lords; and in any case, his government lost office in 1852. His Tory successor as secretary of state for the colonies was Sir John Pakington, who acted without delay. In mid-December 1852, Pakington wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Denison in Van Diemen’s Land. He pronounced himself “not unaware” of the continuing arguments for transportation. Part of the rage to abolish it “may … be ascribed to the prevalence … of one deplorable crime, in consequence of the temporary overcrowding of the convicts”—to wit, sodomy. But better arrangements had checked that; and certainly “the readiness and almost indeed the avidity” with which settlers snatched convict labor from each arriving ship proved that the demand for them was real. However, the pro-transportationists had not formed an effective lobby, and “whatever may be the private opinions of individuals who have not come forward on this question, numerous public meetings and all the legislative authorities in these colonies have declared themselves strongly against transportation.” He would not provoke Australians to “a furious opposition” that would end with hatred of the Crown. Finally there was the gold, whose very existence made it “a solecism to convey offenders, at the public expense, with the intention of at no distant time setting them free, to the immediate vicinity of those very gold fields which thousands of honest labourers are in vain striving to reach.”23

  With this, transportation to Van Diemen’s Land came to an end. The last convict transport, the 630-ton ship St. Vincent, had sailed for Hobart on November 27, 1852. Van Diemen’s Land officially ceased to be a penal colony thirteen months later; and with a collective whistle of relief, its citizens proceeded (as they hoped) to get rid of the “demonic” image of their island once and for all, by giving it the name of its Dutch discoverer: Tasmania, for the navigator Abel Tasman.

  The formal end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land came with the Jubilee of the colony—August 10, 1853, the fiftieth anniversary of the day the first settlement was pitched at Risdon Cove. It provoked a flutter of doggerel in the press. “Hurra for the noble Leaguers!” the Hobart Town Daily Courier exclaimed,

  Hurra for our British Queen!

  Hurra for the tread of Freemen

  Where Bondsmen erst have been!

  Peal on, ye shrill-voiced heralds!

  Your thrilling music tells

  Tasmania’s happy future;

  Peal on, ye English bells!

  From city hall to cottage,

  O’er all our island homes,

  Ring round your benediction!

  The Unstained Future comes!

  Not to be outdone, an editor in Launceston composed a pastiche to the tune of “God Save the Queen.” Thousands of copies were printed on a press which, mounted on a bunting-lined cart, was drawn in procession through the town:

  Sing! for the hour is come!

  Sing! for our happy home,

  Our land is free!

  Broken Tasmania’s chain,

  Wash’d out that hated stain,

  Ended the strife and pain!

  Blest Jubilee!

  The cart, symbol of the power of the colonial press in its struggles for Abolition against foot-dragging officialdom, was preceded by groups separated by bannermen: members of the Legislative Council, the mayor and the corporation, a phalanx of native-born colonists marching four abreast, public societies with their regalia, and “the hope and staff of the colony,” its children. They marched under a triumphal arch of paste-board, decked with fronds of native wattle, to the sprightly tooting and flourishing of a brass band. There was feasting at Ross; and in the town of Oatlands whole sheep were roasted, while the colonial boys played cricket, climbed poles and fell to the breathless pursuit of a greased pig. It darted frantically among the spectators, smearing their moleskins until someone collared it. One “facetious bystander” extolled the animal as a symbol of the fight for Abolitionists’ rights: “That pig, greasy, long-winded and cunning though he was, was caught at last by patience and perseverance.”24

  There were only a few sour notes. The next day, the Hobart Town Daily Courier reported the “ill-advised and unwarranted setting up of an effigy in the back of Messrs. Marsh and Chapman’s timber-yard.” It was removed before it could be burned. The paper did not say whose effigy it was, but everyone knew it was Denison’s. He had offended the colonists, when they asked him to convey their satisfaction with the new policy to the people of England, by replying: “The people of England do not care for you one straw; the Houses of Parliament look upon you as the fly on the wheel.” At this, the press branded him “a coarse-minded, vindictive, ungenerous man,” but Denison had read worse. Abolition was rung in with triple bob-majors on the church bells, not saluted from Battery Point by army cannon. Perhaps the lack of unanimity was appropriate; on the other side of Australia, transportation had begun all over again.25

  iii

  THE LAST PLACE to receive English convicts was Western Australia, the western third of the continent where few had been and fewer, apparently, wanted to go: a colony with a body the size of Europe and the brain of an infant. Except for some coastal patches, it was all desert, pebbles, saltbush and spinifex—the right spot, in the Australian phrase, “to do a perish.”

  Its first settlement nearly did just that. In 1826, Governor Darling sent a detachment of soldiers and fifty convicts to occupy King George’s Sound, the present site of Albany on the southwestern tip of the continent. In establishing a military base there, he hoped he would deter the white desperadoes—escaped convicts and Yankee whaling riffraff with their black slave-harems—who had set up their half-wild tribal communities all along the southern coast from Bass Strait to Kangaroo Island and westward to King George’s Sound.

  The settlement lasted five years, every day of them an ordeal. Officers went half-mad with loneliness and boredom. As for the convicts, the most that can be said is that, with hostile blacks and saltbush desert right behind them and the cobalt grin of a shark-infes
ted ocean in front, none of them tried to escape. Eventually, Darling conceded that no free settler would ever want to go to the Sound, and that the military base was too frail to do much against the sealers. In 1831 he had the garrison and its surviving convicts withdrawn.

  By then, another plan for Western Australian settlement had formed. It centered on the Swan River, and its mover was a gallant young post-captain in the navy, James Stirling (1791–1865), who had married into a family influential both in Westminster and in the East India Company. In 1826 Stirling was given a ship and told to remove the survivors of a dispirited garrison experimentally put on Melville Island, and the Timor Sea near the present site of Darwin. This northern outpost had been meant to discourage the French from landing, but they had never even tried to, perhaps because it was so far off the shipping routes. It had lasted two years and was now on its last legs, rotting from heat, dysentery and terror of the blacks. To avoid the monsoon season, Stirling took the long route around the 4,300-mile coast of Western Australia, imagining as he went a settlement that would keep the French off and be a staging-port for British ships. The mouth of the Swan looked promising, and in March 1827 he spent a delighted two weeks there. Then, picking up the Melville Island garrison, he proceeded to Sydney, composing on the way the first of a stream of memos to Governor Darling and the authorities in England. He urged a settlement at Swan River (Hesperia, he wanted to call it, since it faced the westering sun). He himself would be its lieutenant-governor.26