The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  In Ireland, near Christmas 1803, Emmet’s uprising having deplorably failed, legendary Michael Dwyer, just thirty-one years old, having continued fighting a guerrilla war with thirty or so rebels, threw himself on the mercy of the government. To his own surprise, he was given the promised amnesty and came to New South Wales above decks with his wife Mary and four young children on the Tellicherry. Governor Bligh, of Bounty renown, needing the support of the loyalists for his battle against a clique of army officers in the colony, sent Dwyer to Van Diemen’s Land. Returned to the Sydney area in 1809, Dwyer helped to police the turbulent Irishtown district near the present Sydney suburb of Bankstown.

  General Holt sold his Sydney property in 1811 and returned to Dublin. Dwyer remained, his name lustrous through song and legend to most Ribbonmen transported to Australia later in the nineteenth century. Larkin was in no way consoled, however, by the prospect of adding his ultimate dust to that of Dwyer, who had in 1826 died in New South Wales in ‘respectable prosperity.’

  As every visitor to Australia remarked, here in the time capsule of the antipodes lived plants and animals that had vanished from the rest of the world. And yet the passions of men and women, and the politics of the place, would remind Hugh that despite the distances travelled, he had brought the old world with him.

  Hugh’s new, ultimate master, the governor of this immense territory of New South Wales, was an Irish soldier and landowner in his late fifties, Major-General Sir Richard Bourke. Bourke was a cousin of Edmund Burke, parliamentary orator and attacker of Lord North’s policies in North America and Ireland. Bourke would have liked to have been a parliamentary orator himself, but a jaw wound suffered as a young man fighting the French prevented him from being a forceful public speaker. Like Larkin, he had been created by Irish problems—he had inherited an estate at Thornfield in County Limerick, and bad seasons and uncertain markets meant that he had been forced to seek government offices as a means of paying debts. He had a liberal attitude towards the peasantry of Ireland. Two of his chief colonial officers, the Crown Solicitor John Hubert Plunkett, and Roger Therry, Commissioner of the Courts of Requests in New South Wales, were friends of Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, leader of the Irish party in the House of Commons.

  In his first vice-regal appointment to the Cape Colony in South Africa, Bourke had been accused of being a radical defender of the Kaffirs. In New South Wales, while showing perplexed concern in the cruel destiny of the Aborigines, he was devoted to the proposition of full civil status for emancipists, pardoned convicts. These men and women and their children had a voice in organs like the Sydney Gazette, and were so often associated with demands for an end to transportation, and for colonial self-rule and equal political rights, that Bourke himself was portrayed by enemies as the creature of barely reformed felons. While enjoying the benefits of convict labour, exclusives—those wealthy free settler landowners who believed that political influence should be restricted to themselves—accused Bourke of raising in the emancipists a dangerous expectation of power.

  Bourke was also considered by the exclusives to be dangerously soft on time-serving convicts like Hugh. He had reduced the power of magistrates in remote areas of the colony to inflict punishment on convict servants. Property owners were always reporting in their paper, the Sydney Herald, as proof of Bourke’s ‘soothing system for convicts,’ the impudence and unruliness of their servants and labourers. On 10 March, for example, while Larkin and the others still ‘lay in the stream,’ the readers of the Herald were told by a colonist of the way female convict servants had helped through their insubordination to hurry the late Captain Waldron to an early grave: ‘not only my own female prisoners, but those assigned to my neighbours, have dared us to send them to court. “What do we care,” they say, “for the **** Court, or the old magistrates either?” ’

  As for Irish convicts, they were seen as very dangerous but also as comically incompetent and unruly. The day after Parmelia arrived, the Sydney Herald had carried a characteristic tale characteristically told.

  Eliza Burns, a native of Hibernia, favourites whiskey and potatoes, whispered to the bar, that … she did on Friday last, in Castlereagh-street, commit an assault with a pair of tongs of some value on the person of Mrs Griffiths. Mrs Griffiths … said that the defendant on Friday last, sans provocation, threw some water on her, and fetching a pair of tongs from her house, threatened to lay hold of that useful portion of the face, vulgarly termed a proboscis, or smeller.

  Mrs Griffiths had objected that she would ‘be deprived of the only pleasure, (except a drop of the cratur occasionally) which rendered life desirable, namely that of the taking of sundry quantities of snuff.’

  The comfort in all this was that Larkin and his fellows would find plenty of their compatriots, bond and free, ashore, amongst the upwards of 30,000 prisoners then in Sydney and the bush. Added to this number and still bearing the stigma of former imprisonment were the time-served and pardoned emancipists, who numbered as many again. Both Bourke in Sydney and the British government in Whitehall had schemes to encourage free immigrants, and the population would come close to doubling during Bourke’s 7-year rule, from 1831 to 1837, but the ratio between bond and free was only marginally adjusted. Liberals and improvers, including the children of convicts, cried that Australia should refuse to accept that British penal requirements were the colony’s reason for existence. Free artisans would come in numbers only when they no longer had to compete with cheap convict labour. At the time of Larkin’s landing, however, convict transportation, the order of the colonial past, seemed established as the order for the future as well.

  The town of Sydney to which Larkin and the others were enjoying their first introduction ran raffishly inland along gentle hills either side of Sydney Cove, one of dozens of anchorages in the remarkable harbour. The settlement retained the narrow streets of the original convict camp of the late 1780s. Most houses were cottages with little gardens in front, and clung in random clusters to the sandstone ledges of the Rocks. But they took on a more ornate, orderly character in the streets, Pitt, Macquarie, to the eastern side of town. The landed prisoners, chained to each other and on their way to their depot, heard the catcalls of old lags, veteran convicts. The momentous earth seemed to rock beneath their feet like Parmelia’s deck. The new men staggered uptown past St Phillip’s Church on its hill, past the Colonial Treasury, the Barrack Square, and saw the town’s theatre on the left. Barracks and the offices of government were being built of Sydney’s honey-coloured sandstone, the most splendid structures of this eccentric seaport.

  The town abounded with canaries—convicts in government employ, in sallow-coloured jackets and pants—and free dungaree men, poor settlers and occasional tradesmen, who wore cheap blue cotton imported from India. The lean, dishevelled children of convicts, called ‘cornstalks’ or ‘currency urchins,’ ran wild, grown healthy by the standards of Europe on colonial corn doughboys, salt beef, fresh vegetables. Convict women on ticket-of-leave, a certificate of probationary freedom available once a convict had served a number of years, stood in gardens or outside public houses smoking Brazil twist in dudeens, clay pipes sometimes scarcely half an inch long. ‘Laggers,’ or men who had earned their ticket-of-leave, or parole, wore blue jackets, or else short woollen blue smocks, and the hats of both convict and free were unorthodox, some of plaited cabbage-tree fronds, some of kangaroo skin. Soldiers and police were much in evidence in front of Customs House, Commissariat Office, Treasury, post office, and all government offices. But side by side with this martial formality, male and female sexual services were full-throatedly offered in a manner visitors said was more scandalous than the East End of London. ‘A Wapping or St Giles in the beauties of a Richmond,’ as one Englishman described Sydney, contrasting squalid behaviour to the strange natural beauty all around. The abnormal imbalance between male and female gave the flesh trade an added fever, as did dram-drinking—the downing of Bengal rum out of wineglasses.

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p; Hugh’s line were offered nothing and had to be content to see Government House off Bent Street, the turrets of Government House Stables near the Botanic Gardens, and then the School of Industry and the General Hospital, called familiarly the Rum Hospital, built by three Sydney merchants in exchange for a monopoly on rum imports. On one edge of the dusty green named Hyde Park lay St James’s Church and the courthouse, both splendidly designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway, a Bristolian transported for forging a contract. Across from St James’s were the outbuildings and chief barracks of Sydney’s convict depot, Hyde Park Barracks.

  The superintendent of the Hyde Park Barracks at the time Larkin and the other Parmelia prisoners arrived was a young, recently retired military officer of the 40th Regiment, E. A. Slade. By the time Larkin marched into Slade’s barracks, the superintendent was an enemy of any programme of leniency, and so an enemy of Governor Bourke. Bourke would soon remove him from the magistracy for having abducted a young immigrant woman ashore and for living illicitly with her. Though thought a libertine in his personal life, he was nonetheless an exacting official with convicts, taking pains to ensure that lashes at the barracks were properly given. He would report three years later, in London before the Select Committee on Transportation, ‘When I had the lash inflicted, I never saw a case where I did not break the skin in four lashes.’ He was proud to declare that he had standardised the cats used for lashings throughout New South Wales.

  Larkin, Hessian, the Strahanes and other Parmelia men were fortunate in being not long enough in the barracks to attract more than a cursory glance from E. A. Slade. Many have argued punishment in Australia was no greater than in the British army or navy and less than was employed against slaves in the American South. But floggings were commonly ordered by magistrates throughout the 1830s. The possibility of moral and physical destruction hung over each man, over Larkin himself. Father Ullathorne, an English Benedictine priest in Sydney, believed that the Irish were vulnerable in the face of flogging, which disoriented a man and altered for ever the balance of his soul. The young Polish explorer John Lhotsky, a doctor, was outraged at the harm done to a convict’s heart and lungs by flogging on the shoulders. The use of lashes clotted with infected blood from earlier victims, he feared, helped spread venereal disease.

  But some commentators of the day saw the fact that flogging could be administered only on a magistrate’s order as an absurd nicety. Masters in Britain were still permitted to beat apprentices, husbands beat wives as of right, masters of ships were able to flog their seamen. But convicts, less worthy than spouses, apprentices and seamen, were restricted to a maximum of fifty lashes. Yet it was not as if the lashes designed by E. A. Slade went unused in New South Wales. In 1835, there would be 7,103 floggings amongst the some 30,000 convicts in the colony. So though Larkin, Hessian and the Strahanes were for now sorted into the sheep and not the goats of the penal system, their good fortune could prove impermanent.

  The reason Larkin and the other Ribbonmen needed to spend so little time in barracks was that they had been transported at a period of some prosperity. The Australian countryside was experiencing a spate of lushness. In the area called the Nineteen Counties, the beachhead region which government serviced, and in the huge outer regions where unauthorised grazier-entrepreneurs occupied hundreds of square miles and ran their flocks, there was a demand for agricultural workers. Larkin would be spared the chain and work gangs—described by liberals and emancipists as Egyptian slavery—by this boom in the bush, by a hunger for fine wool in the mills of northern England, by a colonial hunger for mutton and beef. He would be saved too from Sydney, that great Babylon of convictism.

  Perhaps his rural experience in East Galway counted, and the fact that he had clearly swallowed his fury and was watchful now. But then so did the nature of his crime. Experience had told employers that first offender criminals who had made some vaguely political or industrial protest or other were good workers. Of 1,078 so-called protest criminals, including United Irishmen and Ribbonmen, sent to New South Wales between 1800 and 1840 and studied by one historian, not one had previous convictions, and none would commit crimes in the colony. Some English rural labourers who had destroyed threshing machines which they feared would take their jobs had arrived in New South Wales in 1831, and were in tranquil employment. Why should Ribbonmen not prove similarly useful?

  In the year of Larkin’s arrival in Sydney, a young man named Wakefield, recently released from prison in London for the statutory misdemeanour of eloping, published a tract named England and America, in which he called the sort of assignment under which Larkin would soon be labouring ‘slavery in disguise.’ John Lhotsky, journeying in 1834 from Sydney into the very area where Larkin would be sent, came away pitying assigned servants. The prostitution of women prisoners by their masters shocked him.

  The system spread Hugh Larkin’s friends from Galway Gaol all over a vast colony. John Strahane was assigned to a Captain Oldsey, who owned a property called Broulee in St Vincent, one of the southernmost of New South Wales’s Nineteen Counties. By contrast his younger brother Michael was claimed by a settler at Richmond, not more than 50 miles to the west of Sydney. John Hessian went to a Dr Foster of Brush Farm near Bathurst, 150 miles or more inland. Larkin had been applied for by an entrepreneur and pastoralist named William Bradley. To be employed by Bradley, Larkin had to undertake a journey of nearly 130 miles to the inland town of Goulburn, in the county named Argyle, and thereafter might be consigned more deeply still to the spacious bush.

  William Bradley was an energetic man in his early thirties who, unlike most masters, had been born in New South Wales. His father Jonas Bradley, a sergeant of the New South Wales Corps, had been given land grants around Goulburn, grew tobacco, acquired further grants and bequeathed them to his son. When the line of the Nineteen Counties had been drawn, with an extra county later added to the north around beautiful Port Macquarie, it was considered that the five million acres therein contained and open for settlement were more than enough for the inhabitants of the colony. Though a mere sliver of the Australian continent, the area was as large as many nations and three times the size of Wales. It ran 250 miles along the coast and to a depth of 150 miles inland, where the Lachlan River formed a natural boundary. It included rich, well-watered coastal valleys and plains, the timbered Great Dividing Range, and beyond it grazing country. One commentator said of the late 1820s: ‘The Nineteen Counties, to all intents and purposes, meant Australia, and the government decreed that they should be viewed as if the sea flowed all around, and not merely to the east.’ These limits were given a name with a ring: the Limits of Location.

  William Bradley was approaching his thirty-fourth birthday when Larkin went to work for him. He already owned a fine property called Lansdown Park near Goulburn and had built a large residence on it. But like others, he had begun putting livestock and convict labourers on land well to the south of Goulburn, beyond the Limits of Location, in a huge upland plains area then named Maneroo. Maneroo is the modern Monaro, and includes the site of the present Australian national capital, Canberra.

  By 1834 Bradley was running more than 10,000 sheep both around Goulburn, within the limits of settlement, and beyond, in the Monaro to the south. So, on the assignment documents of 1834, Hugh was noted as being sent to Mr Bradley of Goulburn within the Limits. But the convict muster of 1837 said frankly that he was working for Bradley in Maneroo outside them.

  Embarking on his journey to Goulburn with a small cash advance against his wages from Bradley, Larkin travelled, it seems, in his shipboard clothes and without chains. He moved out of Sydney up Brickfield Hill through the late summer bush, eucalyptus trees and acacia and tea-tree scrub, along the Parramatta road and then at a fork a dozen miles out of the town, turned left, to the south-west. He might have travelled on a wagon behind Bradley himself, a rider and a renowned bushman, or else with a convict overseer of Bradley’s returning to Goulburn after delivering wool or collecting go
ods. However accompanied or conveyed, Hugh was entering a hinterland in which unexpected passions, enthusiasms and melancholies would descend on him.

  The land itself was like an argument against remembrance, utterly removed from anything he was familiar with from his Irish manhood. Its trees perversely bloomed in any season and were not stripped by autumn. Yet the strangeness also sharpened the loss of Esther and his sons, and produced the typical chastened wistfulness recorded in ‘The Exile of Erin’ by an anonymous Irish convict, who had laboured at the penal station of Emu Plains in the 1820s.

  Oh! Farewell, my country—my kindred—my lover

  Each morning and evening is sacred to you,

  While I toil the long day, without shelter or cover,

  And fell the tall gums, the black-butted and blue.

  Full often I think of, talk of thee, Erin—

  Thy heath-covered mountains are fresh in my view,

  Thy glens, lakes and rivers, Loch Conn and Kilkerran,

  While chained to the soil on the Plains of Emu.

  Larkin may have seen enough of Irish canaries in chain gangs in the plains beyond the small inland town of Liverpool, then on the mountain terraces and through the passes opening on the interior of the country, to feel dismally lucky. Moving with newcomer wariness, he may have evoked a level of mockery and howls of irony and dark lust from some on the chain. He was instructed at night on the complexities of convict existence, when in the camps amongst Australia’s lanky, irregular trees, ticket-of-leave wagoneers drank pannikins of tea with freshly assigned men and were pleased to pass on tales of Gothic hard luck and the randomness of the system. Twentieth-century historians argue that the success or failure of a convict was not as haphazard as was popularly believed, but campfire talk amongst the convicts themselves took a more melodramatic line, with the system an insensible Moloch of a machine, willing to grind all flesh. During a life sentence, a man could by small folly or mere technicality end up a beast on a chain.