of thinking and speaking of and treating the convicts contemptuously, is, by a very natural process extended to the whole species; and hence the want of respect and deference to others which is so universally manifested.20
By the same token, the importance of being a free man and not a convict “has a tendency to break down the distinctions conceded in the mother country, and thus to place the whole free population on a nearly equal footing.” Contempt was repaid in hatred; convicts and ex-convicts “regard with settled antipathies, nearly amounting to hatred, all who have not been, or who are not prisoners; and, when not repressed by self-interest, this is plainly exhibited.”
Not all the roots of Australian egalitarianism can be idealized. Bush comradeship was real, but so was the defensive, static, levelling, two-class hatred that came out of convictry. From it ran an undertow of impotent dreams of vengeance, as in the hope of Australia’s republican bush poet of the late nineteenth century, Henry Lawson, that the poor man would be educated up and the rich man educated down. By the turn of the century, most connections between early Australian socialist temper and the resentments of the convict past were conventional matters of ritual invocation—or else, they were buried by workers who cherished their right to be respected and no more wanted to be identified with criminal ancestors than the Chartists of an earlier day in England had wished to be associated with thieves and footpads. When such connections surfaced, they took their popular, idealized form, with the convicts presented as shining innocent poachers, Chartists and apple-stealing children, and the bushrangers as Robin Hoods.
The “convict past” is a shadowy behavioral catch-all today. Thus, it made Australians cynical about Authority; or else it made them conformists. As so many Australians are conformist skeptics, the “convict legacy” is seen to be all the more pervasive. Perhaps there are roots of social conduct that wind obscurely back to the convict era, and the familiar Australian habit of cursing authority behind the hand while truckling to its face may well be one of them; it may also be that Australian sexism receives some of its force from the brutal psychic legacy of carceral life. But since the vast majority of European Australians are the descendants either of Anglo-Irish-Scots who arrived after 1850, or of Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, Baits, Poles and Germans who emigrated after 1945, this seems a sterile line of inquiry.
Would Australians have done anything differently if their country had not been settled as the jail of infinite space? Certainly they would. They would have remembered more of their own history. The obsessive cultural enterprise of Australians a hundred years ago was to forget it entirely, to sublimate it, to drive it down into unconsulted recesses. This affected all Australian culture, from political rhetoric to the perception of space, of landscape itself. Space, in America, had always been optimistic; the more of it you faced, the freer you were—“Go West, young man!” In Australian terms, to go west was to die, and space itself was the jail. The flowering of Australian nature as a cultural emblem, whether in poetry or in painting, could not occur until the stereotype of the “melancholy bush,” born in convict perceptions of Nature-as-prison, had been expunged. A favorite trope of journalism and verse at the time of the Australian Centennial, in 1888, was that of the nation as a young vigorous person gazing into the rising sun, turning his or her back on the dark crouching shadows of the past. A “Centennial Song” published in the Melbourne Argus struck the right note of defensive optimism, coupling it with an appeal to censor early Australian history—or, preferably, not to write it at all:
Is it manly, fair or honest with our early sins to stain
What we aimed at, worked for, conquered—aye—an honest, noble name?
And those scribes whose gutter pleasure is to air the hideous past,
Let us leave them to the loathesome mould in which their mind is cast.
Look ahead and not behind us! Look to what is sunny, bright—
Look into our glorious future, not into our shadowed night.
At the heart of each proclamation of renewal was a longing for amnesia. And Australians embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy. They wanted to forget that their forefathers had ever been, or even rubbed shoulders with, government men; and before long, they succeeded.
Nobody could deny that convicts had once been in Australia. Indeed, some of the “old crawlers” were still alive, though only just, in 1888. But they were not invited to crawl in the parades, and the Centenary was not heavy with historical retrospection. One dipped one’s brush in the Stain, to put in a little darkness behind the radiant bouquet of wattle, wheat, Union Jacks and Golden Fleeces that symbolized Australia’s present and future prosperity. One hinted, in the text of commemorative albums that bore cartouches of kookaburras and paddle steamers stamped in gold leaf on their covers, that dreadful things had been done in the remote colonial days of Australia, but new pages must not be sullied; that it was time to draw the curtain at last on so much indignity and suffering and to contemplate the Dawn. “The convict stage is now forgotten as a dream,” wrote one of these Centennial boosters. “Today New South Wales … has an annual import and export trade of nearly £50,000,000,… 1727 miles of railway,… 19,000 miles of telegraph wires.” In Tasmania, “slowly but surely Nature is reclaiming her own, and is effacing the memorials of an infamy which none care to look back upon. Chapter after chapter might be written on the annals of Port Arthur, but they would be inconsonant with the tone [of] these pages.”21
Whenever they could, the instruments of official culture tried to play down the obdurate attachment of the Australian rank and file to its bushranger folk-heroes, to the distant memory of Bold Jack Donohoe and the recent one of Ned Kelly. The memory of the English officer and his punishment-book, of the whole detested machinery and practice of forced labor and flogging, was shifted into the background as one of the things on which it was unhealthy to “dwell.”
Australian politicians conceived and ran the Centenary as a lavish feast of jingoism, a tribute to the benevolent, all-embracing British Empire. Without Britain’s market, Australian business could not survive; without her institutions, especially the Monarchy, Australian morality would decay; without her dreadnoughts, Australian blood would be yellowed by hordes of invading junks. Bunting, flags, parades, speeches and more bunting were rammed down the popular throat, and only republicans gagged on them.
The organ of their protest was The Bulletin, that anti-imperialist paper, which excoriated the whole idea of the Centennial as a slavish feast of Australian dependence. Australia, it argued, began its first hundred years as a penal colony, but was finishing them as an economic and political one. Its irons had been struck off but nothing else had changed. One of its cartoonists made this point with a pair of drawings: the first, labelled 1788, of an Irish convict dancing a jig in his chains for the amusement of an English officer; the second of a modern bush-settler in his cabbage-tree hat, doing the same dance for John Bull in 1888. In an editorial headlined “The Day We Were Lagged,” The Bulletin called the celebrations “a feeble, fifth-rate drunk—a sort of combined scalp dance and gin conversazione—in honour of the meanest event in [our] short history.”22 The Australian Centenary was a “feeble copy” of the American one of 1876: “The elements of grandeur are entirely wanting. The great Republic rejoiced, not on account of an empty flight of years, which pass alike for man and beast … but in honour of the triumph of liberty over grasping tyranny. Australia, on the other hand, celebrates a century which begins and ends alike in nothing. A hundred years have left her as they found her—a name but not a nation, a huge continent content to be the hanger-on of a little island.”23 However unwelcome these sentiments, there was a good deal of truth in them, and even more in the connection The Bulletin drew between imperialisms past and present:
The day which inaugurated a reign of slavery and loathesomeness and moral leprosy—is the occasion for which we are called upon to rejoice with an exceeding great joy. Yet there might be a palliati
on even for this, if Australia could show that she had shaken off the old fetters and the old superstitions of that dark era.… [B]ut the old slavish taint still clings to her garments, and her chains of iron are merely exchanged for chains of gold.24
English capital, the editorial went on, was imported every day to develop Australian resources—“and, naturally enough, the English capitalist takes the resources themselves for his pains.” It was better to be poor and independent, The Bulletin urged, pointing to Chile, Mexico, Switzerland, and above all the Boer Republic, whose “little army of farmers almost exterminated the gaudy troops of England and slaughtered their aristocratic commander at Matuta Hill.… [E]ven the effeminate soldiers of Egypt made a gallant struggle before their native land sank into a feudatory of England, but Australia, by the mouth of such ‘representative statesmen’ as GILLIES and PARKES, declares herself to be something meaner than Egypt and lower than the Boer Republic. The declaration is one which fits the occasion and does honour to the anniversary of the day on which our first families were—exported.”25
Nothing could be allowed to diminish the gratitude Australians were meant to feel for the imperial umbrella. The essence of colonization was that they could claim no history of their own. Some thirty years before the Centenary, the English gold-seeker John Sherer had complained of the historical blankness of the antipodean landscape, where nothing recognizable had happened for millennia:
There can be no walk, no journey of any kind, more monotonous than one through the bush.… There is no association of the past connected with it. Your sight is never regaled with the “ruins grey” of some fine old fortress.… Imagination is at a standstill—fairly bogged, as your body may be in the mud-swamp. There are no sacred groves … No time-hallowed fanes, sanctified by the recollections of hospitable deeds … No fields, recalling the downfall of tyranny … Nothing whatever to visit as a spot noted as being capable of exalting the mind by the memories with which it is associated. No locality, memorable as the haunt of genius. No birthplaces of great men … Nothing of this kind; all is dully-dead, uninspiring mud-work.26
But if the landscape carried no such litany of association, Australian children would; they were made to read the novels of Walter Scott and the deeds of Sir Francis Drake, to recite like parrots the names of English kings, the dates of unexplained events like the Rump Parliament and the Gunpowder Plot, the lengths of European rivers they would never see—while, as the poet Henry Lawson complained in the Republican in 1888, they were shown nothing of Australian history earlier than 1850. Educators played their part, with the result that it became impossible to find, in any history book used in Australian schools up to the mid-1960s, a satisfactory or even coherent account of penal Australia. For what was this meager “history”? A chronicle of provincial misery; a minor episode in English imperial policy, best forgotten. What was distant in time and space was real; what was close had been sublimated into the substance of bad social dreams.
Amnesia and shame nibbled at the edges of the record, without altering it much. A citizen might ink over his family name in a ship’s bound indent; the record books of trials and convictions at country benches in New South Wales would sometimes be burnt, so as not to inflict social pain on innocent descendants. But the mountain of paper the System left behind it was too huge to be removed.
Paper outlives stone and brick. Most of the buildings directly associated with the System in Australia are long gone. Most historically significant structures raised in New South Wales before 1835 or in Tasmania before 1850—churches, stores, town halls, courts, villas, station homesteads, bridges—were built, wholly or in part, by convict labor. Many of them remain, especially in Tasmania, which did not have enough money to pull them down and build new ones. But there seemed little point in keeping obsolete jails and barracks standing as souvenirs of a haunted past, and the few that survive only narrowly escaped a general demolition. On Norfolk Island, the pentagonal New Jail and the huge Prisoners’ Barracks at Kingston, along with many lesser structures, were torn down for building-stone by the new inhabitants who moved in after the last convicts left—the descendants of Fletcher Christian’s mutineers and their Tahitian women, relocated from Pitcairn Island in 1856. Except for the eroded foundations of cells that protrude illegibly from the green carpet of turf, little is left in the compound, and even the walls and gates themselves, raised so high by the sweating gangs, were narrowly saved from being bulldozed to create a picnic park in 1959. At the head of Sydney Cove, now renamed Circular Quay, nothing speaks of the convict past; a banal modern sculpture of two joined bronze ellipses, which might represent leg-irons, turns out to be an allegory of the bonds of friendship between Sydney and Portsmouth. There is no monument of any kind to the men and women of the First Fleet, and none appears to be planned for the Bicentennial in 1988.
Yet despite neglect, amnesia and a thousand unconscious acts of censorship, the System did continue to flourish in popular memory—as Grand Guignol. One of the few tourist attractions of Hobart in the 1880s was the Success, a convict hulk that had lain in Port Phillip Bay for years and had acquired a delectably bloody reputation, as its prisoners had joined in the killing of “The Demon,” John Price. Entrepreneurs had bought her and fitted her out with dummy convicts and an imposing array of fetters, gratings, handcuffs, punishment-bands, balls, chains and cats, all genuine (such things had not become expensive colonial antiques at the time), along with the black iron armor worn by the bushranger Ned Kelly at his last stand at Glenrowan. When most of the population of Tasmania had trooped through her, the owners sailed Success to Sydney in the hope of bigger crowds. She was promptly censored: Scuttled in the dead of night by indignant citizens who did not wish to be reminded of the Stain, Success sank at her moorings with the loss of all waxworks.
The locus classicus remained unsinkable. Port Arthur was closed down in 1877. By then, its roster of inmates had dwindled to 64 convicts still serving their accumulated sentences, 126 paupers and 79 lunatics. They were transferred to Hobart; the convicts came ashore in handcuffs and leg-irons, even though most of them were old and infirm, before a gaping and giggling crowd.
In its last years it had been visited not only by Anthony Trollope but by the young Australian novelist and journalistic hackabout Marcus Clarke, who had pored over a mass of documentation on convictry in the Melbourne Public Library and, inspired by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, had decided to write his own epic of crime and punishment. Clarke’s His Natural Life began running as a serial in the Australian Journal in March 1870. It ran for two years, and in the end it lost most of its readers. But its appearance as a book in 1874 revived it—and, with it, came a revival of popular interest in the System and its dreaded epitome, Port Arthur.
Clarke and his followers impressed the full character of Grand Guignol on the place, for they knew their audience. Why, not so long ago, did one hear “oral traditions” (tall stories for tourists) about collective suicides of children jumping, like lemmings, from the cliffs at Point Puer to evade the miseries of flogging and rape; about slavering convicts eating the dead in the darkness of Commandant Booth’s mineshafts? Because, given the lack of serious historical writing about transportation for more than seventy years after Clarke’s novel was published, its stories became “true.”
Port Arthur inhumanity had been made its central myth long before—by George Arthur’s enemies in the Van Diemen’s Land press. In the 1870s, when Clarke and Price Warung (followed by a horde of penny-a-liners) began to write their versions of the System, the myth had become “reality” and so could be re-invested with fantasy. Hence Clarke’s goriest episodes, such as the cannibalism of Gabbett at Port Arthur (a thinly disguised version of the escape of Pearce), were shifted from Macquarie Harbor in the 1820s to the Tasman Peninsula in the 1830s, and used to “typify” the System. Likewise, Clarke’s suicide of Tommy and Billy, the little Point Puer boys who jump from the cliff, is one of th
e finest heart-wringers in Victorian fiction—a penal answer to the death of Little Nell:
“I can do it now,” said Tommy. “I feel strong.”
“Will it hurt much, Tommy?” said Billy, who was not so courageous.
“Not so much as a whipping.”
“I’m afraid! Oh, Tom, it’s so deep! Don’t leave me, Tom!”
The bigger baby took his little handkerchief from his neck, and with it bound his left hand to his companion’s right.
“Now I can’t leave you.”
“What was it the Lady that kissed us said, Tommy?”
“Lord have pity on them two fatherless children!” repeated Tommy.
“Let’s say it, Tom.”
And so the two babies knelt down on the brink of the cliff, and, raising the bound hands together, looked up at the sky, and said, “Lord have pity on us two fatherless children!” And then they kissed each other, and did it.27
Nothing like this ever happened at Point Puer, but the tourists loved it. On fine weekends in the late 1870s and through the ′80s, hundreds of trippers would descend on it from Hobart in paddlewheel steamers, shrieking with agitation as they were locked for a few minutes in the pitch-black, stony silence of the Dumb Cells, chattering happily as their boots crunched through the debris in the echoing penitentiary dormitories. Sometimes a visitor would be able to buy a rusty leg-ring or a rotted hobnail boot from one of the “locals” who, now that Port Arthur had been officially renamed Carnavon and re-incorporated as a town, were trickling back to the Tasman Peninsula. The appetite for carceral souvenirs had not been lost on a Hobart photographer named John Watt Beattie, who documented the buildings and some of the surviving Old Hands of Port Arthur and even visited Norfolk Island. He also printed postcards of prison emblems—elaborate still lifes of leg-irons, cuffs, keys, guards’ carbines and paraphernalia from the Model Prison, surrounded by swags of leaves and wildflowers.
The Fatal Shore Page 87