Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  To a great extent, young Warner was dependent on the co-operation of convict overseers and constables along his section of the road, all of them craftier and more capable of subtle brutalities than he was. He sweated within the uniform of his authority in the furious summer of 1827-28, and had a great problem supplying water to the gangs in the steep terrain through which the road was to be cut. He wrote a disgusted dispatch to the Colonial Secretary, Alexander Macleay, in Sydney in the sizzling days of February 1828, and complained that Wiseman allowed up to one hundred of his pigs at a time to roll in the brackish mud flats of the river and then rush off into a freshwater creek from which he was supposed to supply the gangs with water. He ordered his scourger, Joseph Anderson, to help prevent the stampede of pigs from salt mud to freshwater creek each day. Anderson himself, however, was a problem. Warner wanted him to work on a road gang in between scourging those who committed misdemeanours. Anderson argued that his only duty was to scourge, a task which generally only took him, as Warner complained, a half-hour’s labour a week.

  The overseers of the gangs along the hills rising out of the point on the Hawkesbury where Wiseman had settled were men whose savage authoritarianism pleased distantly placed officers, but which made them a target for those who had served under them. Henry Martineer, the overseer of Number 9 iron gang, wrote to the authorities asking that, since he now held a ticket-of-leave, he be moved somewhere away from the North Road, ‘to any other part of the Department’. Otherwise he would have to resign as an overseer for fear of reprisal. He was not only frightened of convicts, but of crafty old Solomon Wiseman. Wiseman had demanded that Martineer sign off on a greater quantity of fresh meat than the gang required, and had threatened to take Martineer’s horse and ride off to a magistrate and have his ticket-of-leave confiscated. Martineer’s own superior, Percy Simpson, a free, fully qualified surveyor, had himself several times complained about Wiseman’s illicit behaviour, but because the gangs on the North Road were so dependent on the old lag and his sons for supplies, for bringing troops and members of gangs across the Hawkesbury by ferry, and for the use of a number of barracks for soldiers and convicts, there was nothing that could be done.

  Under Major Edmund Lockyer, chief surveyor, Percy Simpson was the day-to-day maker of the Great North Road. Simpson was a characteristic man of Empire, looking for a place in the devalued post Napoleonic war labour market for his amalgam of skills. He had been born in Canada, governed the Greek island of Paxos, and now been made superintendent of the road in this most difficult terrain. His gangs’ side walls and stone bridges across deep gullies, his culverts and drainage systems, can still be encountered on the back road that was once the colony’s chief way north.

  Governor Darling had described the convicts in the road gangs as ‘the refuse of the whole convict population’. Certainly they were twice convicted, but in unlucky cases the second sentence imposed on them might have derived from a magistrate who knew and dined with the convict’s master. It might have also involved what a modern mind would think of as forgivable offences like drunkenness.

  Even so, the members of road gangs had a reputation for being plunderers of remote homesteads in their spare time—they would climb up the chimneys of their huts at night to escape or go walking off on Sundays to steal spirits or food or clothing. Sometimes conniving overseers—convicts themselves, or ticket-of-leave men—were accused of being the chief organisers behind the thefts. The convict novelist, James Tucker, depicted overseers who encouraged or forced convicts to run away from the gangs. The overseer would then ‘recapture’ the convicts as they rested in the bush and receive the reward, which he had undertaken to share with the escapees. The further benefit to an escapee was that he would probably be locked up for a few days without having to work, prior to being flogged, and then may have had further rest while recovering before returning to the road gang. The chance of favouritism for some convicts, and bullying and brutality for others, was an obvious flaw in the system.

  Each iron gang contained up to sixty men in irons and was supervised by a principal overseer and three assistants. Road parties, unchained, were made up of fifty men. But Lockyer established also bridge parties made up of twenty-five or more skilled men who in their life before transportation had been carpenters, stone-cutters or masons. These men were given better treatment and allowed more latitude. There were, by 1829, forty gangs spread over hundreds of kilometres working for Lockyer’s Roads and Bridges Department; in 1830 ten of the gangs—up to six hundred men—toiled on the Great North Road.

  Most of the gangs lived extremely roughly. The members of one gang in the Blue Mountains in the 1830s slept under one blanket each in temperatures that fell below freezing, often in huts too crowded for everyone to lie down. In these cramped quarters, the physical and sexual savageries between young and old, strong and infirm, comprise something over which the imagination might perhaps prefer to cast a veil. When the doors were unlocked in the morning and the men relieved themselves on the iced or frosted ground, they were offered rations which had frequently been fiddled by the overseers in collaboration with the supplier—the arrangement Wiseman was trying to establish with Martineer back on the Hawkesbury. And if Wiseman could frighten a ticket-of-leave overseer like Martineer, one might imagine his power over an ordinary member of the road gang.

  Breakfast for the gangs was maize porridge with an ounce (c 28 grams) of sugar. The midday meal was a stew of one pound (454 grams) of fresh or salt meat with one and a half ounces of salt and damper or pudding made with one pound of flour. Part of the latter was to be kept for supper. During the summer months the overseers mustered their convicts at five o’clock in the morning, supervised their breakfast then marched them from their huts to the construction site. They returned to their station at twelve noon for dinner and marched back to work at one o’clock, remaining there until the evening meal at six. At 2 p.m. on Saturdays they were led to a pond or river to bathe and wash their clothing, made distinctive by the use of half yellow and half grey cloth. So marked, the convicts either radiated defiance or kept their heads lowered, knowing they were at least two sentences removed from even conditional freedom.

  CONVICT NOVELISTS

  Since commerce and the pastoral industry occupied the energies of literate males in early New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, it fell to convicts to write the first Australian novels, melodramas which despite their exaggerated effects convey the authentic flavour of the time, and the reality of the degradation of the penal system.

  The very first novelist was Henry Savery, a well-educated businessman aged thirty-three in April 1825, when he stood trial. Tom Savery, his father, was a Bristol banker. Henry was the sixth son, but considered himself the fifth because one of his brothers had died three days after birth. Hence, the ‘Quintus’ in the name of his fictional gentleman-convict Quintus Servinton, whose name is also the title of the novel. Savery spent his early manhood in London and married the daughter of a Blackfriars businessman. They moved back to Bristol where from 1817 he was in partnership in a sugar refining, or ‘sugar baking’, business. In economic difficulties, for a time he edited the Bristol Observer, but returned eventually to the sugar refinery. The Times reported Savery’s arrest in December 1824. He had committed the firm beyond its resources without the knowledge of his partner and had been negotiating money bills for two years with fictitious names and addresses. These fraudulent bills, worth between £30 000 and £40 000, were commonly known as ‘kites’ and made Savery technically guilty of forgery.

  When these irregularities turned up in Bristol, Savery fled to London with his mistress, for he had been panicked by the recent execution of the famous forger Henry Fauntleroy. His wife tracked him down, but he told her to ‘Go back! Your route will be traced and my ruin will be effected.’ Savery booked passage for the United States on the Hudson, soon to leave from Cowes. He seems to have used a variation of the name Servinton for this purpose, and is said to have been arrested onl
y thirty minutes before the sailing hour. When the constables boarded, Savery threw himself into the sea, was rescued, and restrained. He was then put under constant watch because of his suicidal behaviour.

  Four months later, in the spring of 1825, he pleaded guilty before Lord Gifford, and was condemned to death by the judge who donned the black cap. One of the prosecutors, seeing Savery struck witless by the sentence, pleaded with the judge for leniency. Savery spent a miserable few days in the death cell, but on the eve of his execution the sentence of death was commuted. He was transferred in July to Campbell’s old Justitia hulk at Woolwich. From the hulk he joined the convict ship Medway which left Woolwich on 20 July 1825 for Shearness, where a young Presbyterian minister, John Dunmore Lang, came aboard. Lang wrote, ‘A free passage by a convict ship in those days consisted merely of having an empty space of about six feet [1.8 metres] square in the “tween” decks, with bare walls and without furniture of any kind, together with a soldier’s ration.’ He found the captain, with whom he had contracted to dine for £70, a ‘greedy, unconscionable Scotsman’. Lang, who was to become a political and social activist in New South Wales, probably conversed with Savery who had apparently travelled in separate accommodation from the convicts ‘by order of Government’.

  Half the convict population of Medway had to be sent to hospital on arriving in Hobart for treatment for scurvy. Savery himself was landed in prisoner’s dress, his head closely shorn and conducted to the common gaol yard for inspection and assignment. Governor Arthur thought that Savery showed horror and remorse for his crimes. But he seems to have had a rugged ego as well. He worked as a clerk for the Colonial Secretary and then for the Colonial Treasury, receiving £18 per annum plus a ration. His early appointment to such pleasant posts drew attacks from enemies of Arthur, and criticism from the Home Secretary, Lord Goderich. There were also questions about why his forgiving wife was invited to join him, for in 1828 Mrs Savery embarked for Van Diemen’s Land. Her original ship was grounded on the English coast near Falmouth, but she bravely tried once more and ultimately arrived in Hobart on the Henry Wellesley. But the voyage had provided her a chance for dalliance. On board she met and fell in love with the young Attorney-General of Van Diemen’s Land, Algernon Montagu.

  In his novel, Savery’s (and Quintus Servinton’s) admiration of honourable men of business is unstinting, for their standards were what both author and chief character so often aspired to but failed to achieve. Like Savery, Quintus is a sugar refiner. Soon after his marriage to a merchant’s daughter from fashionable Bedford Square, Quintus begins to suffer from the fact that he is overstocked, having bought from other merchants just before the market declined. Quintus declares that ‘improvident speculations in trade’ are like a vice. Recovering, he finds his business burned down. Withdrawing to a rural retreat, Quintus makes the acquaintance of smugglers. ‘Mr Carew informed him that one and all in the neighbourhood, rich and poor, gloried in outwitting the revenue officers.’ Quintus’s ongoing partnership in a troubled business becomes the subject of investigation for ‘kites’—forged money bills—‘flown’ by the partner Mr Kitely. Kitely absconds. Quintus resolves thereafter to build his credit ‘upon the shallow and deceitful quicksands of fictitious bills’.

  When the date for a payment arrives, ‘he provided himself . . . with a fictitious note for £500, the drawers and endorsers of which were creatures of his own brain, having no real existence’. Then Quintus reads in the evening newspaper a report that a particular forger of false bills has been ordered for execution on the following Tuesday. ‘You surely do not mean, sir,’ asks Quintus, ‘it can be forgery to issue paper bearing the names of persons who never existed?’ Caught himself, tried and condemned, Quintus Servinton receives many letters of support. Quintus travels to the hulks in a special compartment with a condemned former officer, who is not burdened with chains but is wearing ‘a single basil’; that is, a single iron around his ankle. This was the arrangement in the Woolwich hulks, says Quintus, where ordinary soldiers and guards were willing to get people favours for money. Quintus Servinton pays to get an easy job on the shore (where the convicts are landed from the hulks to labour every day) as deputy supervisor of a gang. A doctor ultimately is ‘sweetened’ into giving him an exemption from labour, and sends him to the hospital ship. His mail is censored, but he is able to pass his letters to his wife, Emily, through the surgeon, a Scot, who appoints Quintus his secretary.

  Quintus becomes the target of a faction amongst the convicts who complain to the Home Office about his preferential treatment (as happened with Savery in Hobart). After he is transported and becomes a very useful servant of a member of the colonial gentry, Mr Cressy, he becomes painfully aware that, ‘It was a part of the pains and penalties attached to persons in this unfortunate situation, that although in matters of business they might be received, and treated with respect due to former station and conduct, the intercourse between themselves and the free inhabitants went, generally speaking, no further. Anything like familiarity, or approaching to sweet converse, was totally out of the equation.’

  In the novel, the interloper in the wife’s affection is Mr Alverney Malvers. But Savery depicted him as behaving in a manner admirable, reserved and courteous. Once reunited with her true husband, the fictitious Emily resolves to return to England and extract a pardon. She succeeds, and it is a matter of poignancy that the novel ends as the tragic author hoped his own life would.

  However, when Mrs Savery arrived in Tasmania she found that her husband had exaggerated his circumstances, and there was a great quarrel as a result of which Savery attempted suicide by cutting his throat. He had also been sued by creditors, and Mrs Savery’s own possessions, brought out with her, were subject to the suit. Savery was imprisoned for debt in December 1828, and hardly three months after her arrival his exasperated wife left for England with her son on the Sarah, and Savery never saw her again. Later, after he received his ticket-of-leave, he would apply for her to be sent out again, but the lady did not reply.

  Savery was in debtor’s prison for fifteen months. In that time he wrote the non-fiction works The Hermit of Van Diemen’s Land, 30 Sketches of Hobart Life and Characters. Early in 1830, he was released and assigned to Major McIntosh in the New Norfolk district, north-west of Hobart on the Derwent River. It was in the later months of his time with McIntosh that he wrote Quintus Servinton. Advertisements appeared in the Hobart Town Courier and in the Tasmanian in January 1831 to say that the book would soon be published in three volumes. Most copies, it was announced, were to be shipped to England and only a few reserved for sale in the colony. The Hobart Town Courier wrote of the book on 19 March 1831: ‘though it cannot certainly claim the first rank among the many eminent works of a similar kind of the present day, it is very far from being discreditable to us as a first production of the kind in these remote regions’.

  In June 1832, the Colonial Secretary was influenced by a number of petitioners to grant the novelist his ticket-of-leave. By then Henry Savery had become the assistant of Henry Melville at the Tasmanian newspaper. But under a general order which forbade convicts to write for newspapers, Savery was deprived of his ticket-of-leave for twelve months. He was suspected of having written a particular article about a police magistrate, but a free citizen journalist who had in fact written it came forward and admitted his authorship. But Savery was caught up in a fight between Governor Arthur and the magistrate. In the coming years he boldly took and was the subject of many litigations. He was not a quiet soul, but on the other hand he had the misfortune of being seen as a proxy for the governor, and thus an easy target. Above all, he could not avoid financial trouble and insolvency proceedings began against him in the late summer of 1838. By that time he had received his conditional pardon and took over a farm at Hestercombe near Hobart. The Board of Assignment disapproved of his leniency towards a convict servant and terminated his right to have one. He began to make up bills with fictitious signatures on the back, a new
and complete act of forgery.

  There was a story in the Hobart Town Courier that Savery had fled to Launceston, hoping to escape to Adelaide. But he was arrested in Hobart and in October 1838 was brought for trial before Algernon Montagu, the man who may have been his wife’s lover. Montagu, reviewing Savery’s career, declared, ‘I will not, however, so far stultify myself as to suppose . . . reformation will be shown by you.’ He transported Savery for life to the Tasman Peninsula (or Port Arthur).

  Savery died there fifteen months later. His former editor, Henry Melville, declared that he had cut his own throat. A visitor to Port Arthur recorded that on 9 January 1840 he saw Savery in the hospital ‘where we had a signal opportunity of drawing a wholesome moral from the sad—the miserable—consequences of crime. There, upon a stretcher, lay Henry Savery, the once celebrated Bristol sugar-baker—a man upon whose birth fortune smiled propitious.’ The witness mentioned ‘the scarce-healed wound of his attenuated throat . . . Knowing as I once did in Bristol, some of Savery’s wealthy, dashing, gay associates, I could not contemplate the miserable felon before me without sentiments of the deepest compassion mingled with horror and awe.’

  The other early convict novelist was the author of a manuscript that came out of the Port Macquarie Literary Club, an officially condoned gathering made up largely of educated convicts, from the time when Port Macquarie, north of Port Stephens on the New South Wales coast, served as a station for relatively educated, though fallen, gentlemen. James Tucker was born in Bristol early in the nineteenth century and attended Stonyhurst Jesuit College from 1814. Later he worked on a farm owned by a relative of the same name until a disagreement over the planting of peas led to a split. James Tucker the younger, who had received £5 from his cousin, threatened him with a charge of unnatural crime unless he should pay another £5. His relative put a Bow Street runner on James’s track, and he was arrested and brought to the Essex Assizes charged ‘with feloniously knowingly and willingly sending a certain letter . . . threatening to accuse James Stanyford Tucker with indecently assaulting him’. Young James Tucker thus received, as improbably as it sounds to the modern ear, a life sentence, and arrived aboard the transport Midas in Port Jackson in 1827. In March 1827, Tucker was sent to the Emu Plains agricultural establishment, at the foot of the Blue Mountains, a place which, though dealt with melodramatically in his novel, clearly appalled him with the chicanery and brutality of its convict overseers and constables. In the novel, Ralph Rashleigh, he depicts a scene where at the magistrates court awaiting punishment: