The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Some Frenchmen—though not, as a rule, those who had actually been there—did admire the English penal experiment in Australia. “Eh! qui ne connait pas le consolant spectacle,” sang a penally inspired bard named Delille in 1830, in a work entitled “De La Pitié” (“On Pity”),

  Qu’étale de bandits ce vaste réceptacle

  Cette Botany-Bay, sentine d’ALBION,

  Ou le vol, la rapine et la sédition

  En foule sont venus, et, purgeant l’Angleterre,

  Dan leur exil lointain vont féconder la terre?

  La, l’indulgent loi, du sujets dangereux

  Fait d’habiles colons, des citoyens heureux;

  Soucit au repentir, excite l’industrie,

  Leur rend la liberté, des moeurs, une patrie.

  Je vois de toute part les marais déssechés.

  Les déserts embellis, et les bois défrichés.

  Imitez cet example: à leur prison stérile

  Enlevez ces brigands, rendez leur peine utile.1

  To foreign eyes, the long experiment on the Fatal Shore generally seemed a success, as philosophy in action: “Imitate this example, take these brigands from their sterile prison, make their punishment useful.” It might have been more widely imitated, had there not been such a shortage of undiscovered continents in the early nineteenth century. France would presently pay England the sincere homage of imitation by constructing its own Pacific convict colony, a hellish one, in the New Hebrides.

  The proponents of British transportation had hoped that, broadly speaking, it would do four things: sublimate, deter, reform and colonize. First, it would remove the “criminal class”—or a good slice of it—from England, and put it where it could do no further harm to the English polity and the interests of property. It was social amputation. What was the cause of crime? Criminals, who manufactured or, rather, secreted it from their inner nature, as snakes their venom or eels their slime. Get rid of criminals and you would get rid of, or at least greatly reduce, crime in Great Britain. Transportation had to fail in this, because the causes of crime lay further back in the social system: in poverty, inequality, unemployment and want, and in laws that had relentlessly created new categories of “transportable” crime. Transportation did rid England of many real sociopaths, men whose aggression and violence were built into their genetic labyrinth, but they were in a minority—and not a few were usefully absorbed by the System as overseers and floggers.

  By the 1830s, the hopes of the English authorities had centered on a second aim. This was deterrence. Transportation would not only get rid of the guilty, but terrify the innocent away from crime. The problem with arguments about deterrence is the lack of figures on uncommitted crimes. One cannot know if the threat of a given punishment really did stop the thief at the windowpane.* The crime rate in early-nineteenth-century England did not drop as a result of transportation, again because its roots lay too deep for any deterrent to reach. But what most complicated the matter was the difficulty of convincing the lower classes of Great Britain that Australia was a terrible place to go.

  This had been a problem from the start. A verse entitled “The Convicts’ Departure,” jocose rather than satirical, written as early as 1790, raised the possibility that Botany Bay might prove a milky land, compared to the withered dug of Mother England—a place where

  … every day

  Nature is kindly giving,

  Plenty to have, and nothing to pay,

  This is the land to live in.2

  Nobody on the early fleets can have believed this, but the notion of a colonial Eden was not readily dispelled by colonial experience, since the whole Pacific was faintly tinged (if not in learned discourse, then in popular fancy) with the sweetness of Otaheite. The idea that one might be better off there than in England—that, in the words of the ballad, it was “Better to range in a foreign land / Than in a prison perish”—persisted after the time of Governor Macquarie, who gave commonsense recognition to the fact that, despite the pretensions of the Exclusives, the stock of Australian life would be, for the foreseeable future, Emancipist and Currency. After Macquarie had gone, the contrast was still confirmed by the miseries of common English life—the growth of slums, the unemployment, the ruin of smallholders. Hence the proletarian idea that Botany Bay might not be so bad survived the policies that were meant to destroy it: the increased severity of the regimes of Brisbane, Darling and Arthur; the brutality of the chain gangs; and the outright ferocity of Macquarie Harbor, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay.

  Some of this may have sprung from the bravado of prisoners sending letters home to England, playing down their sufferings to soothe the anxieties of their wives and children, or merely wishing to seem unbowed by the System. Some, no doubt, was due to wishful thinking among those at home. But by the 1830s, with due allowance made for the harshness that went with assignment, some of it was true. The convict with manual skills, if he had the luck to be assigned to a decent master in the back country, stood a chance of living a better life than he might have done amid the penury of England’s rural depression. “The grand secret in the management of convicts,” an emigrant’s handbook of the early 1830s insisted, “is to treat them with kindness, and at the same time with firmness.” Most masters knew this from experience, though their “kindness” rarely had much sugar in it and their “firmness” could be that of petty pharaohs. “It is true,” wrote Edward Curr, superintendent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, in 1831,

  that convicts are sent out here as punishment. But it is equally true that it is not in the interests of the master to make his service a punishment, but rather to make the condition of the convict as comfortable as is consistent with economy. The interest of the master essentially contradicts the object of transportation.3

  When he got his ticket-of-leave, the redeemed convict’s work was more in demand and his wages higher than in England or Ireland. As we have seen, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land held no shortage of brutal masters, and a man could be crushed under the penal system like a toad beneath a harrow—but he could also remake his life. Those who went under did not write home; those who prospered sometimes did.

  Try as it might, the British Government could not stop the flow of impressions this opened. It gave orders to increase the severity of the penal stations, and under Governor Darling some 20 to 25 percent of all male convicts in New South Wales suffered appalling conditions, either in the chain gangs or in the penal out-stations. The Home and Colonial Offices kept urging their proconsuls in Australia to make the System harsher, more certain in retribution, more machine-like—right up to the moment when transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was abolished.

  Successive governments, Whig and Tory alike, made no secret of their view that transportation was meant to inflict relentless suffering rather than to reform the criminal. But Britain could not come out and tell the public at large how bad things really were in Norfolk Island or the Blue Mountain chain gangs, for fear of looking sadistic; or how lenient they could become in assignment, lest its System seem weak. The first was left to the reformers, the second became a kind of folk-whisper that sounded louder than the voice of Whitehall in the ears of hedgers or coachmen.

  This was not the first time that the low of England had balked at believing the high, but the size of the credibility gap on transportation is perhaps indicated by the fact that Charles Dickens should have contemplated leaping into it on the government’s behalf. On July 2, 1840, he wrote to Lord Normanby, the literary Whig home secretary, pointing out that most English criminals now thought of transportation as a passport to opportunity and even wealth, and offering to write “a vivid description of the terrors of Norfolk Island and such-like places, told in a homely narrative with a great appearance of truth and reality and circulated in some very cheap and easy form.”4 One would like to know what Dickens would have made of Maconochie, for the Scottish reformer—brave, compassionate, fixated and priggish—was a very “Dickensian” creature; but
he never went. Dickens’s polemical reporting on prisons would come two years later, in his journals of a visit to America. In 1851, of course, with the discovery of gold, any lingering terrors eastern Australia might still have held for English laborers were outweighed by the possibility of making a fortune.

  The only fully drawn character from penal Australia in Dickens is the returned convict Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860); and Magwitch sums up the distaste verging on dread with which some middle-class Englishmen (Dickens included) viewed the transported convict “making good” in exile. As a child, the hero, Pip, has saved Magwitch from the gallows by helping him evade his pursuers in the fens; but Magwitch is betrayed by a “gentleman” crook and disappears to Australia, swallowed by the black hulk, “a wicked Noah’s Ark.” The plot turns on a mysterious benefaction that transforms Pip, in his young manhood, into a “gentleman.” The money is revealed to have come from Magwitch, who has gone back to Australia, made a fortune and, in gratitude, endowed the one human being that ever showed him compassion. Magwitch is a figure edged with terror: coarse, brutalized, possibly a cannibal.* His energy is demonic, his thirst for revenge insatiable. And it turns out that his anonymous, obsessively prompted generosity to Pip is another kind of revenge, a black joke against English and colonial class relations. Pip will be his revenge on the Exclusives, who still spurn him as a risen felon. Do gentlemen make convicts? Then a convict will “make” and “own” a real gentleman, not a colonial facsimile. He will show the truth about gentility: It can be bought. He will hug the knowledge of that for the rest of his life. Under the skin of generosity, there is slavery in reverse. “And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look’ee here, to know in secret that I was making a gentleman,” Magwitch tells the horrified Pip:

  The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself, “I’m making a better gentleman nor ever you’ll be!” When one of ’em says to another, “He was a convict, a few year ago, and is an ignorant common fellow now, for all he’s lucky,” what do I say? I says to myself, “If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no learning, I’m the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?” This way I kep myself a-going.

  He tells Pip the truth about his upbringing to close the circle of revenge. Magwitch’s sufferings have put him beyond taking pleasure in another’s gratitude:

  Do I tell it, fur you to feel an obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman—and, Pip, you’re him!

  It occurs to Pip that he is now a convict, too; Magwitch has been “loading wretched me with his gold and silver chains for years.” No wonder that “the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.”

  Thus in the person of Magwitch, Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but they could hardly, in the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal sense, but what they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders. And yet they were capable of redemption—as long as they stayed in Australia.

  The redemption of sinners came a distant third on the aims of transportation. Yet it may be that more people were reformed in Australia—in the sense that they came out of bondage meaning to work for their living and obey the law, and were not convicted again—than were ever “deterred” from crime in England. This was due to the assignment system. Assignment did give its “objects” a chance. Not evenly, or consistently, or reliably—but often; whereas the more schematized, “ideological” punishment of Lord Stanley’s Probation System in the 1840s was a demoralizing fiasco, and all the worse because Her Majesty’s Government tried to do it on the cheap.*

  For all its flaws (and one cannot imagine a prison system without defects) the assignment system in Australia was by far the most successful form of penal rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, American or European history. In assessing it one must remember that many of its critics, in dwelling on the cruelties and injustices that took place within it, were doing so not as objective reporters but as proponents of rival ideologies of punishment. From Bentham with his Panopticon to Lord Stanley with his Probation System, every one of them opposed assignment in the name of penal Utopias which, when tried, were worse. The assigned man’s work was hard (unless he was lucky enough to get work as a domestic servant or a clerk, as many did). But it was not necessarily harder than the kind of work a settler had to do for himself; and to judge by the surviving letters of assigned men who had been rural workers before, it was not worse than the labor of a farm-hand in Britain, despite the flies, the snakes and the heat. Enemies of the System got used to calling this work, and the condition of those who did it, slavery. But it was not slavery. The assigned man worked within a vigilantly sustained framework of laws and rights. Some of the masters were cruel, others irresponsible, some exploitative and a few openly sadistic. But most were none of those things; they were hard, imperfect men struggling to wrest survival or something more from the stingy Australian earth, and many of them had been transported themselves. Few of them perceived their assigned servants as a seigneur did a serf, and those who wished to were frustrated by the law.

  Assignment had been the early form of today’s open prison. Instead of herding men together in gangs—in which bad apples automatically dominated—assignment dispersed them throughout the bush and kept them in working contact with the free. It fostered self-reliance, taught them jobs and rewarded them for doing them right. It put them on the frontier and did not leave them to rot. Of course, one can overrate the virtues of assignment. But as a rough-and-ready way of getting convicts back into society as self-sustaining workers, it was better than the soul-crushing, totalitarian machinery of the Philadelphia System applied at Pentonville to “reform” Lord Stanley’s probationers and Lord Grey’s exiles before they took ship to Australia.

  Its results were uneven. For a decade and more after transportation to New South Wales ended, colonial society wanted to believe that the residue of convict evil produced most of its crime. In 1835, at the peak of transportation to New South Wales, its courts had handed down a total of 771 convictions for all indictable offenses committed against property or against any person within the colony—a rate of nearly 1,100 convictions per 100,000 inhabitants. From there, the annual number of convictions fell slowly, but the population, swollen by immigrants, grew rapidly, so that by 1851 the conviction rate was just over 290 per 100,000, and by 1861 it was 122—about a tenth of its level in 1835. The conviction rate for New South Wales in 1835 had been about ten times that of England. By 1861, it was only twice as large.5

  Without doubt, the crime rate fell as the Stain was diluted by immigration and the original felons died off. But did its fall argue reformation as well? In 1841 about three men in five in New South Wales had originally been transported. In 1851 about three in ten had been—still a lot. Very few of the convictions (about 6 percent) were for crimes committed by the Currency (native-born Australians)—partly because so many of these were children, but largely because the Currency adults, despite the jabber about hereditary stains, were diligent family-oriented workers with a stake in their community. By contrast, convicts or Emancipists (all of whom, by definition, were adults) were the defendants in 70 percent of all criminal trials that yielded convictions in New South Wales in 1841.

  As the historian Michael Sturma has shown, one should see this seeming endurance of a propensity for crime in the light of other factors. New South Wales remained a police state well after it finished receiving convicts in 1840. “Its machinery for social control was directed largely to the coercion of convicts. They were subject to more stringent regulation, kept under closer surveillance by the police, and treated differently by the courts.”6 T
he police leaned on Emancipists as well, legally free though they were. It was far harder for an offender to disappear in a tiny outback town or even in Sydney than in the vast and pullulating anonymity of London. Hence, ticket-of-leave men and Emancipists were more likely to be charged and convicted. They had the worst jobs, the least capital, the lowest education. Hence they were more likely to steal, fight and get drunk. In sum, Australia presented them with much the same social disabilities that had pushed them into crime in Britain, and one thing more: the unrelenting, go-getting, land-grabbing, cash-and-gold-obsessed materialism of free Australian colonists, acting in a vast geographical space but a small social one. Nowhere in the world was the Victorian equation between wealth and virtue rammed home more brutally than in mid-nineteenth-century Australia. With such a social ethic, it is perhaps surprising that the conviction rate was not higher. Indeed, such gross figures as 666 superior-court convictions in New South Wales out of a total population of 265,503 do not begin to justify the rantings and wailings of local Jeremiahs on their obsessive subject, colonial morality.

  The fourth, and last, aim of transportation was colonization. Here, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will. As James Matra had pointed out before the First Fleet sailed, no one would take such a voyage to such a place “from romantick views.” To ask what Australia would have been without convicts is existentially meaningless. They built it—if by “it” one means European material culture there—and their mute traces are everywhere: in the peckings and scoops of iron chisels on the sandstone cuttings of Sydney, hewn with such terrible effort by the work gangs; in the fine springing of one bridge at Berrima in New South Wales, and the earnest, slightly bizarre figures carved on the face of another at Ross in Tasmania; in the zigzags of the Blue Mountain road, where traffic now rolls above the long-buried, rusted chains of the dead; less obviously, in the fruitful pastures that were once primeval gum forest: