The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Shame on the mouth

  That would deny

  The knotted hands

  That set us high!7

  What these people bequeathed to Australian character, or to our sense of ourselves as a nation, is much more debatable than the economic results of their labor. Probably it was not what Australians like to think—the truculent independence on which, with shaky justification, we are apt to pride ourselves.

  To see the opposite effects of the System on those who lived it out, one may consider Tasmania, which stagnated. Its population had crept from 69,000 in 1851 to 102,000 in 1871, not even doubling in twenty years. Visitors at the end of the 1860s saw apathy and depression everywhere: silent streets, building at a standstill, farmers sinking into rural solipsism, empty docks, a static populace heavy with old people and children but deserted by the young and energetic, who had gone across Bass Strait. The flood of immigrants to Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales passed Tasmania by. The island was decaying, like the Southern slave states of America after Abolition. Convicts remained an inescapable presence, a gray-and-yellow ghost in a dying house. Although Her Majesty’s Government had stopped sending prisoners to Tasmania so long ago, the long-sentence men remained there and had to serve out their years of stipulated punishment; the imperial convict system was not fully dismantled until 1886.

  Economic stagnation condemned the island to live with its past; long after the rough developing energies of the mainland colonies had transcended the “convict stain,” the Dr. Jekyll of Tasmania remained paired with the sinister Mr. Hyde of Van Diemen’s Land. Convictry lived on in a hundred pervasive ways. It seemed to be rooted in the very landscape, cankering its lavish and picturesque beauty, as the Irish political prisoner John Mitchel remarked in his journal in 1850:

  Trees of vast height wave their tops far beneath our feet: and the farther side of the glen is formed by a promontory that runs out into the bay, with steep and rocky sides worn into cliffs and caves floored with silvery sand, shellstrewn, such as in European seas would have been consecrate of old to some Undine’s love … and over the soft, swelling slope of the hill above, embowered so gracefully in trees, what building stands? Is that a temple crowning the promontory as the pillared portico crowns Sunium? Or a villa, carrying you back to Baiae? Damnation! It is a convict “barrack.”8

  Instead of Paestum, Port Arthur. Instead of the train of classical satyrs, the road gangs “harnessed to gravel-carts … their hair close-cropped, their close leathern caps, and hangdog countenances … evil, rueful and abominable … vacant but impudent.”9 Instead of Claudian or Turneresque nymphs in this landscape, a pass-holding woman servant in the charge of a convict constable, “a hideous and obscene-looking creature with a brandy-bloated face and a white satin bonnet, adorned with artificial flowers.”10 Tasmania was a place of social counterfeits and off-key echoes, where “the convict-class is regarded just as the negroes must be in South Carolina,” and ex-convict shepherds “whistled nigger melodies in the balmy air.”11 The main veneer, however, was Englishness. In Tasmania one found every kind of frustrated longing for British privilege and British aristocracy, but the only proper coat-of-arms would be “a fleece, and a kangaroo with its pocket picked; and the legend Sic Fortis Hobartia crevit, namely, by fleecing and picking pockets.”12 It was, to Mitchel’s piercing though jaundiced eye, a pathetic replica accurately made from wrong materials:

  At one o’clock up comes the Hobart Town and Launceston day coach, which … is precisely like what an English stagecoach was before the railroads had swallowed them all up. The road is excellent, the horses good. The coachman and guard (prisoners, no doubt) are in manners, dress and behaviour as like untransported English guards and coachmen as it is possible to conceive. The wayside inns we passed are thoroughly British; even, I regret to say, to the very brandy they sell. The passengers all speak with an English accent.… Every sight and sound … remains me that I am in a small, misshapen, transported, bastard England; and the legitimate England itself is not so dear to me that I can love the convict copy.13

  Even allowing for Mitchel’s unconstrained spleen—Tasmania was his prison, and he an Irish nationalist—no visitors were writing of the mainland colonies in such terms by 1850.

  The toxins of convictry would linger in Tasmania for another generation after 1853. There was no sudden purging of the Stain, and even its old name stuck to it like tar; “Vandemonians,” in the eyes of the free Australian working class, were either criminal drones or tyrants. “During the last twenty years,” wrote a journalist as late as 1882,

  I have been thrown among some hundred of immigrants, and I can safely say that not one in a hundred of them knows this island by the name of Tasmania; but it is well-known as Van Diemen’s Land; the land of white slavery.

  No new felons were coming, but the old ones remained, and the census of 1857 showed that half the adults of both sexes on the island (and 60 percent of the adult men) were either convicts or Emancipists.14 It took the Old Hands another thirty years to die off, and in the meantime they supplied most of the crime in Tasmania. In 1848–49 convicts and Emancipists formed 68 percent of the population but committed 93 percent of its serious crimes. In 1866–67, although only about 35 percent of the adults there had gone through the System, the convicts and Emancipists were responsible for 70 percent of the crime. In this period, Tasmania had the highest crime rate in Australia: 1.72 Supreme Court convictions per 1,000 people, as against 1.3 in New South Wales, 1.18 in Victoria and 0.61 in South Australia.

  Meanwhile the refuse of the System—the broken, the unhinged, the helpless, the mad and the abandoned—clogged the institutions of Tasmania. What transportation produced in them was not Victorian “manliness” but abject neurosis. Ticket-of-leave men from the Probation System were scattered all over the interior—debilitated, muttering odd-jobbers who were known, with the usual finesse of Australian slang, as “old crawlers.” In 1867, a clergyman recalled meeting one of the “old crawlers” in the employ of a former naval officer. The retired salt boasted that he had had his man “flogged times without number.… I have put a rope around his neck, and on horseback dragged him back and forth through that pond.… But it was all of no use, the man will not leave my service.” At which the Reverend John Morison reflected that the worn-out incorrigible “must have been so habituated to punishment that it had become a kind of necessity to him, and likely he felt at times uneasy if he did not receive any; all that was human in his nature must have been well-nigh lashed out of him, leaving nothing but … the nature of a spaniel dog.”15

  A few “old crawlers” did not crawl. One of the frissons of Anthony Trollope’s visit to Tasmania was his journey to Port Arthur in January 1872. There, he interviewed one of its last fifteen or so prisoners, an Irishman from Londonderry named Dennis Doherty, one of “the heroes of the place … who told us that for forty-two years he had never been a free man for an hour.” Doherty was tall, heavily tattooed, with a large cleft chin and one small gray eye. He had enlisted in the 16th Lancers as a boy, and he was still a lad of eighteen in May 1833 when a court-martial in Guernsey sentenced him to 14 years’ transportation for desertion. From that point on, he traversed the whole of the System. In 1837 the Sydney Supreme Court sentenced him to life imprisonment on Norfolk Island as a bushranger. After four years, he feigned madness well enough to be repatriated to Sydney. He was reconvicted at Berrima Quarter Sessions, in New South Wales, for bushranging in 1841, and returned to Norfolk Island for his second life sentence. A year later, he went on the Probation System to Port Arthur. In 1844 he was sent back among the hard cases to Norfolk Island. On the way he tried to seize the brig Governor Phillip, for which he received his third life sentence. In 1853 Doherty returned to Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as it was now called, to serve out the rest of his probation. Two years later, he received his fourth life sentence for assaulting a man with a stolen gun. And so it had gone on. Over the years, Doherty told the astonished Trollope, he h
ad received more than 3,000 lashes. “In appearance,” the writer noted, “he was a large man and still powerful, well to look at in spite of his eye, lost as he told us through the miseries of prison life. But he said that he was broken at last.” Doherty had made his last escape attempt three weeks before and had been brought back “almost starved to death”:

  He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a whole life of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in his old age. “I have tried to escape; always to escape,” he said, “as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?” The man’s first offence, that of mutiny [sic], is not one at which the mind revolts. I did feel for him, and when he spoke of himself as a caged bird, I should have liked to take him out into the world, and have given him a month of comfort. He would probably, however, have knocked my brains out at the first opportunity. I was assured that he was thoroughly bad, irredeemable, not to be reached by any kindness, a beast of prey, whose hand was against every honest man, and against whom it was necessary that every honest man should raise his hand. Yet he talked so gently and so well, and argued his case with such winning words! He was writing in a book when we entered his cell … “Just scribbling, sir,” he said, “to while away the hours.”16

  Dennis Doherty was then fifty-seven, and his conduct record, which Trollope had not been able to see, bears out what he said of his life. It is a litany of almost inconceivable suffering and defiance, pages long—lashes, chains, gang labor, solitary confinement, for offenses that ran from “Absconding” and “Mutiny” to “Having a Crayfish in his possession without authorization.”

  By the 1870s, Tasmania had more paupers, lunatics, orphans and invalids than South Australia and Queensland combined, concentrated in a population less than half of theirs. Despite the labor shortage, most ex-convicts were discriminated against, usually with a sullen reflexive viciousness, by the freeborn. They were regarded as lazy, improvident, unworthy to own land; and as the Victorian animus against homosexuals grew ever stronger in Australia after 1850, so did the belief that most convicts were sexually tainted. “The growing dread of the frightful practices to which it is well known many of them are addicted,” remarked a Parliamentary committee in 1860, “render[s] their search for employment often tedious and difficult.” In contrast to the ex-convicts of New South Wales, the felonry of Tasmania was so fettered by social prejudice that it could never rise. Moreover, the laws governing their work and their relations to their employers retained, dilute but unmistakable, the iron and gall of the System. Thus, under the 1856 Master and Servants Act, masters had the power to arrest their servants, and it was quite legal for an employer (or any member of his family) to put a hired hand in custody on suspicion of an offense and keep him confined for a week without trial. The extraordinary fact was that this law remained on the statute books of Tasmania for more than a generation; in 1882, the Legislative Council rejected efforts to repeal the employer’s right of arrest. This would not have happened so late in New South Wales, with its working-class resentment of authority, its ethos of mateship and its mistrust of “boss-cockies.”

  By and large, Tasmanian Emancipists showed very little sense of themselves as a political group, so that “the large ex-convict component in the population probably retarded the growth of radical and working-class politics.”17 Probably this was because so few Irish convicts were sent there. Forty percent of all transported felons went to Van Diemen’s Land. But in the period 1812–1853, only fifty-one transports sailed from Ireland to Hobart, an average of hardly more than one ship a year.18 As a result, the proportion of Irish to English convicts was far, far smaller in Van Diemen’s Land than in New South Wales; and the percentage of Catholics was about half that on the mainland—17 percent of the white Tasmanian population, bond and free. The Irish were not a powerful minority in Tasmania, and they never became one. The residual clan collectivism that they had brought to New South Wales, which would give such a strong root to the anti-authoritarian, stick-together ethos of the mainland workers, scarcely existed in Tasmania. The exaggerated “Englishness” of post-penal Tasmania was one result of this, since the thin colonial elite etched its values on the classes below it.

  So Tasmania is a problem for those who would like to believe that most Australian bush virtues—intransigence, sticking to your “mate,” distrust of judge, trap and nob, unpolished self-reliance, democratic and brusquely dissenting temper—were created by the convict system. If this were so, one would naturally expect these traits to be vividly emblazoned on the social fabric of Tasmania, the colony with the highest density of convicts and their descendants. But they were not. Workers were less sure of themselves as a class there than in New South Wales, because they were selling their labor in a buyer’s market: Tasmania nearly always had a glut of hands, New South Wales a shortage. Moreover, Tasmania had little sense of the frontier and hence no context in which the “bush ethos,” however sentimentalized, could flourish. It could not expand, and this marked its people. It remained a close-settled, leaf-green microcosm, where the roving bush-worker, beholden to no squatter and picking up his check where he wandered, was a complete anomaly. Nomads made respectable Tasmanians wince; they thought of escaped probation gangers.

  What convictry left to the island, then, was the very opposite of its supposed legacy in New South Wales: a malleable and passive working class, paternalistic institutions, a tame press and colonized Anglophile values. The idea that rebels are the main product of oppression is a consoling fiction. In any penal society the rebel is always the exception and never the rule. Tasmania was a factory, a “mill for grinding rogues honest,” which turned out an unleavened human mass, a submissive lumpenproletariat of men and women, cudgelled into humility by repetitive task-work and the all-pervasive threat of corporal punishment. They had learned to eat out of the hand of Authority, because Authority had always fed them. They illustrated the melancholy truth of Vauve-nargues’s maxim: “Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.” And because there were so many of them in proportion to the free population, immigration being so slight, Authority was harder on them than in post-penal New South Wales. The depth of virulence of Tasmania’s obsession with the Stain still astonished visitors from the mainland in the 1890s, even though by then hardly any Old Hands remained alive.

  Yet there is no doubt that bitter memories of the System were sometimes a deep source of energy of Australian independence—on the mainland. John Fawkner (1792–1869), the “Grand Old Man of Victoria,” who with John Batman settled Port Phillip Bay and founded Melbourne on the Yarra River in 1835, was a convict’s son, who shipped with his father to the first settlement of Hobart Town in 1803. Growing up with convicts, he sided with them as a class. When he was twenty-two, his sympathies were confirmed in blood and agony: He helped seven prisoners build a lugger to escape to South America, but it was captured and Fawkner, implicated, received 500 lashes. He carried the cat’s claw-marks on his skin—the essential text of a power he loathed—for the rest of his life. But he also worked and cheated, made money, turned himself into a “bush lawyer,” started newspapers of liberal-radical bias in Van Diemen’s Land and then in Victoria, and campaigned vituperatively for the rights of convicts and small settlers. Fawkner spent fifteen years on the Legislative Council of Victoria as a populist gadfly, “the tribune of the people.” His target was the big sheep-grazing families that had “locked up the land” for themselves, growing fat from convict labor and hungry for more. He saw transportation itself, not the transportees, as the shame of Australia; he wanted to foster a society of yeomen farmers. Fawkner’s stubborn, cantankerous altruism was rooted in his experience of convict Tasmania, but it only became politically effective in the wider arena of the mainland.

  By the mid-
1830s, the struggle for Emancipists’ rights had been won, and it would never pay another Australian politician—as it had paid Wentworth, on his long progress toward fantasies of colonial aristocracy—to campaign for ex-convicts as a group. The idea of a convicts’ party was absurd, and there were no political advantages in displaying one’s own convict past—or that of one’s parents. On the contrary: The drawbacks were extreme. Australians, especially well-to-do and powerful Australians, retained no sympathy with or interest in the convict past. They only wanted to forget it. The exceptions were mostly working-class Irish, mainly in New South Wales, among whom convict memory was concentrated and to some degree fetishized. It survived because it linked up to an older tissue of recollection, the general pattern of English oppression of the Irish. It tended to produce a dug-in clannishness, the attitude of a “mental ghetto … a thought-universe of harsh conflict,” as the historian Miriam Dixson called it.19

  If it did contribute to Australian egalitarianism, then it did so in a most unamiable way. In the 1830s, astute observers like Maconochie and his associate Alexander Cheyne felt that the primary division of Australian society into two classes, the bond and the free, tended to flatten distinctions of class between free men by concentrating their hostility on the convicts below them. “The habit which most of the free contract,” Cheyne told the Molesworth Committee,