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

by Thomas Keneally

  Liberals in New South Wales and in Britain, however, believed that the convict system was a national disgrace, particularly the road gangs which some of Larkin’s comrades would have to survive. But they considered worst of all the arrangements at Norfolk Island, the exquisite basalt plug, lovely in nature, humanly appalling, nearly a thousand miles out in the Pacific. Bad luck, a false step, an angry word, could take Hugh there yet. Larkin had by now heard that while Parmelia waited ‘in the stream’ to unload its convicts, a mutiny had occurred on Norfolk Island. Most of the mutineers were Irish convicts. The acting superintendent of Norfolk Island at the time, a petty man named Captain Foster Fyans of the 4th Regiment of Foot, and his superior Morisset, had helped catalyse the outbreak, and to the annoyance of the exclusives, Bourke pardoned sixteen of the thirty convicts found guilty and sentenced to death. In appointing a replacement for Morisset, Bourke may have been impressed by the fact that on Parmelia Major Anderson had flogged only one man. Anderson was given the administration of Norfolk Island, and instructions to reduce the regularity of floggings and hangings.

  He was in place on Norfolk even as Hugh travelled west, but his presence would not improve Norfolk Island’s repute. Later, Anderson spoke of his time there as a period of ‘humble endeavours.’ The number of average lashings, he argued, was reduced to seventy or seventy-five cases a year, and the individual sentence was between 50 and 300 lashes, ‘whereas in Colonel Morisset’s time they always exceeded a thousand.’ Yet amongst the punishments he inflicted on the prisoner William Riley were 100 lashes for saying, ‘Oh my God!’ while chained up following the mutiny, and a further 100 for smiling on the chain. Anderson also reported without embarrassment how he rode his horse over the ‘impertinent Daniel Shean,’ formerly a soldier of the 50th Regiment, a man who was apparently so reformed by the experience that he returned to service with the regiment, and was—said Anderson, as if this death confirmed his redemption—eaten alive by an alligator in the Ganges. Hugh and the men he met on the trail did not yet know of these exploits of Anderson’s—some of them still in the future. But they would not have been surprised. To everyone in mainland New South Wales, Norfolk was hell’s core.

  Hugh carried in his jacket a ‘private employment ticket,’ to be produced on the irksome demand of soldier or constable. The trail of British law ran to a degree he found awesome along roads of red clay and dust even in this remotest sector on the planet. Lying on his blanket in late summer air, he knew he could abscond—that was the official verb—and live a marginal and unstable life, a bushranger subsisting by theft of livestock, ultimately driven to raid settlers’ homes, and then to be hunted down, hanged, or sent to Norfolk Island. The authorities had emphasised this message in the week Parmelia arrived by executing three absconding convicts or bushrangers, the ‘Hunter River desperadoes’—William ‘Blue Stockings’ Johnson, William Gills and William Elliott—who had fatally wounded a policeman. Well educated now by the limits of past impulsive action at Mr Seymour’s door, he had like many others resolved not to consider bolting. The system which could mangle him was also the machine which could deliver him safely at the end, and might even deliver Esther and his sons.

  Yet as he tramped over Towrang Hill down to the inland town of Goulburn, like other Irish convicts he secretly though futilely retained his Ribbon attitudes, his willingness, like the absconding Irish bushranger Jack Donahue, to see any act of rebellion he was driven to as part of an ancient resistance, that of ‘the Emmets, the Tones and the Moores,’ as Bold Jack Donahue put it. But Donahue had been shot and somewhat kinder possibilities might exist for Larkin. Bradley was a sort of Tory, but of the less virulent colonial-born variety. He had a native flexibility. A large man, he could strip off his shirt and stand beside a convict and shear a sheep. He would serve on the New South Wales Legislative Council’s select committees on Aboriginals, land and economic conditions, committees which admittedly gave scope to his economic interests but were also concerned with social improvement. Ultimately, he appeared before the House of Commons to speak on the question of colonisation of Australia by the people of Ireland as a necessary boon for both countries. While others of his class abhorred Irish immigration to New South Wales, Bradley would give support to the plans of Caroline Chisholm, an English woman who devoted herself to bringing unmarried women from the British Isles, especially from Ireland, to Australia. ‘He told me that he approved of my views,’ Mrs Chisholm said of Bradley before the House of Commons Select Committee on Colonisation from Ireland, ‘and that if I required anything in carrying my Country Plan into operation I might draw upon him for money, provisions, horses.’

  Larkin may have worked for a little at Lansdown Park, Bradley’s pastoral headquarters near Goulburn, but he was soon sent south to become a shepherd, stockman and labourer. Monaro was a relatively high inland plain enclosed by hills covered with eucalyptus trees and hardwoods, and scattered in its higher reaches with boulders left behind by a vanished glacier. An Englishman, William Brodribb, looking for land to settle in Monaro soon after Larkin was assigned to Bradley, wrote of it with enthusiasm. ‘I crossed the boundary line separating the County of Murray from the Maneroo squatting district … passing east through a delightful plain called Michelago—on my right the lofty ranges, through which the Murrumbidgee ran.’ On his east the coastal range named the Tinderies towered into the sky and ‘the scenery altogether was magnificent, although in the depth of winter.’

  As Larkin travelled south into this country where land had no protection and no price, where a settler’s capacity to stock it with sheep and convict labour was the only question, he met increasing numbers of the nomadic Australian Aborigines. Many had been reduced to fringe-dwelling status in towns, and worked for police as trackers, or for stock bosses as stockmen. Others still lived tribally and travelled their traditional ground, carrying their kangaroo or opossum rugs and cloaks, their weaponry, and their gourds and calabashes and bark dishes. Though in their travels they followed a calendar of food-gathering and ritual events of intricate subtlety, they were judged to be aimless. The Irish, so passionate on land questions themselves, did not inquire whether the indigenes had any ownership of this ground.

  In 1834, the year Larkin began working for Bradley, as the southern winter began, severer in that part of New South Wales than nearly anywhere else in the colony, Bradley was running 800 cattle and some sheep at a place called Bullanamang near Bredbo, nearly 300 miles south-west from Sydney. Over the next ten years he would consolidate his runs into a vast inland property stretching from Michelago near the then non-existent Canberra down to the present border of the state of Victoria. Bradley’s ultimate pastoral holdings here would be close to 3,000 square miles, and would stand beside his other assets, his brewery in Goulburn and his ultimate interest in the Sydney-to-Parramatta railway.

  Bradley—already, in 1834—occupied beyond the Limits more land than most Irish lords, and yet on his bush rides he slept on a sheet of bark wrapped in kangaroo skin. He and other settlers lacked any title to their Monaro holdings. There were no fences. The boundaries of runs or land grabs were often marked informally with tree-blazes or an occasional cairn of stone. Bradley’s class of occupiers saw themselves as enterprising and respectable British gentlemen doing the sort of earth-inheriting expected of them, and sent into the bush according to God’s plan for humankind. The term squatter was in 1834 applied to absconders living in scrubby country beyond the Nineteen Counties. But because even ‘respectable’ settlers in these regions were technically breaking the law by being here, ‘squatter’ gradually became attached to bush gentry like Bradley.

  Ultimately, in 1836, two years after Larkin made his first acquaintance with this odd, immense bushland, Governor Bourke would yield to the reality of these highly capitalised occupations, and assent to imposing licence fees, legitimising Bradley’s and others’ informal occupation of the outer reaches of New South Wales. The British Home Office gave grudging consent to this arrangement
.

  Beyond the Limits, the pastoral system Hugh found was unlike anything around Lismany. There was a central homestead area, where the master or his overseer lived with the cattle grazing about, often moving up into the mountains. Early in Larkin’s transported career, this chief homestead was located near the point where the Bredbo River flowed down its narrow valley and joined the broader valley of a river named the Murrumbidgee, about 170 miles south of Goulburn. From this central area, flocks of sheep were sent off in a number of directions under the care of teams of convict shepherds, nicknamed hatters (since isolation might render them eccentric). Unless he was instantly recognised as a good offsider or homestead worker, this was Hugh Larkin’s first occupation in the bush. Eight or ten miles from the homestead, screened off by wooded hills and flinty ridges, a bark hut would be built as an outstation for two shepherds and a hut-keeper. A tree Larkin had never previously encountered, the red beefwood, was best for producing sturdy uprights. Bark panels to make walls and roof were easily stripped from gum trees. A flue of bark and a flour or cracker barrel on top provided the chimney Larkin had never had at home.

  Alexander Harris, the ‘Emigrant Mechanic,’ as he called himself, spoke of sleeping in such a bark hut barely more than 6 feet square and looking up at the stars through the gaps in the roofing. Occasionally, Harris said, the floor became so infested with fleas that the hut-keeper would drive all the sheep into the place, the fleas transferring themselves en masse to the livestock. But for many rustic convicts, bark huts were not much different from the cabins of Ireland, except that the hearth fire of fallen eucalyptus branches possessed a redolence different from a turf fire.

  Who were Hugh’s companions in his trial period as a shepherd, and what did they talk about? Larkin heard from fellow shepherds the regional accents of Ribbonman Ireland, the voices of Cockneys, Scots, Welshmen, some among them Erse or Welsh speakers. But a shepherd might sometimes be a fallen student of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, a cashiered lieutenant in the Buffs, a hard-up French count caught running confidence scams in London, or a quiet, literary old man with a haversack of English magazines and reviews. One squatter described his collection of shepherds as machine-breakers (they had attacked mechanised weaving machines), drunken and insubordinate British marines, small thieves or horse stealers, but no major criminals. They were ‘safe guarded from the defects of their character by their isolated life.’

  This then was Hugh’s early routine: from the hut every morning, each of the two shepherds would walk out with his sheep in an opposite direction to the other, and graze his separate flock in solitude amongst the strange, gargling bird calls and in the massive quietude of the bush. Hugh found the unpeopled bush a drastic contrast to the crowded, sociable countryside of Ireland, and in its fearful spaciousness an encouragement to a morbid revisiting of the personal rashness, the unchanged grievances, which had landed him here.

  Some of his fellows became so unhinged by the endless thinking-time that they moved through the bush with dogs chained to their waists at each side, to bark away ghosts and remorse. Others communed with stones, saw incarnate devils in their flocks or believed the boulders were an audience watching them. Hugh distracted himself from madness: he must have noticed, for example, that it took more pasture here than in East Galway to support a sheep, and yet the flocks grew splendidly.

  The predominant colours of this country were brown and olive green. It made few concessions to the Irish eye in terms of subtleties of weather, of light and landscape. In the winter, beginning in July, the morning ground this far south would crackle underfoot from frost, just as in Lismany, and there was sometimes snow. For Hugh had been assigned to a rare Australian region, where snow was no novelty. Summer, he would find, was sometimes soft breezes and pleasant air, but at other times a baking dome of sky, unrelentingly blue. Irish convicts began tentatively to salt the strange country with Celtic names: Cashel Rock, Burren Downs, Tipperary. But it remained unapologetically itself.

  Returning at dusk to the vicinity of the hut, the two shepherds rejoined the hut-keeper, who had spent the day resting in the bark hut, cleaning, and cooking mutton and damper, a bush bread of flour and water. The three convicts would count the two flocks into temporary folds made of brushwood hurdles. Four dozen or so of these hurdles, light, easily constructed, 6 feet long, stacked by the hut, were set up each night, sometimes some distance off. A little coffin-like portable box, handles at either end, was put in place between the two flocks and there the hut-keeper spent the night, to protect the livestock from the native dogs or dingoes, or from Aborigines. Dingoes possessed preternatural courage and cunning which would establish for them an especial place in settler mythology, and one dog could kill five or six dozen sheep without being heard. Men who lost too many sheep were returned to the convict depot and work gang, beaten by the overseer or flogged at a magistrate’s order.

  The shepherds and hut-keepers were forbidden to communicate with their convict neighbours, miles off in the next outstation, in case the flocks were ‘boxed’ or mingled, and the delicate balance of wethers, ewes and rams Bradley had selected was thrown out. The three minders in each set were meant to console themselves with dark tea sweetened by gum-manna—a sort of fructose resin collected from eucalyptus trees—and with sucking on their clay pipes. In return for this isolated care of flocks, a convict shepherd could earn—if paid in money instead of kind—£12 or more a year, and authorise his master to bank money against his ultimate release. Men who could ride and herd cattle were also needed and paid. Everyone, at homestead and outstation, lived off mutton, vegetable gardens, and supplies of flour brought in once a year by bullock wagon.

  In Larkin’s first lost year beyond the Limits of Location, in a brisk Monaro June, lambing brought a spate of activity and the reassurance of the familiar. It was of course his chance to show competence. The lambs needed to be weaned, dressed, castrated and branded with pitch. Sick lambs might be brought into the hut, to the fire. Then, as the weather turned warm in October, the shearing commenced at the homestead. The shepherds brought in their flocks to shearing stations alongside the Bredbo, Numerella or Murrumbidgee Rivers. Larkin and other men stood waist-deep in the spring flood as the flocks were run through the river; each animal was passed along from man to man and ducked. Larkin rubbed at the Bathurst burrs caught in the wool, at the excrescences which had accumulated on the sheep’s back during the weeks of grazing. But he noticed the quality as well: this wool was about to beat the wool of Saxony and East Galway for strength of fibre and length of staple.

  Beside the shearing shed was a rough wool press of split timber. The fleeces were packed in there, the weight being a large glacial stone roped to a pole. It is hard to connect these rough operations to the huge fame Australian wool was then achieving in Europe. In helping bring a new and more sought-after wool to the world market, Larkin was devaluing the product of his nemesis, Seymour.

  In the end, the stupefaction of the bush may well have consumed him in a routine of spring sheep-washing, of October shearing, of droving sheep to Goulburn or from Goulburn to the high country of Monaro. Men shared the solace of moonshine distilled by the few gaunt-faced absconders hidden in the hills above, who occasionally descended in coats of kangaroo skin and on horses stolen from some other station to visit huts, trade and complain that they were being crowded out by settlement. To Larkin, these rare contacts with men of no future, who would die alone in the bush, end on the scaffold, or vanish to Norfolk Island, were a sobering and reconciling business. They were frequently Irishmen who shared Larkin’s politics. Unlike them, however, Larkin certainly knew now that after eight years’ good behaviour, he could petition for his family to be sent to New South Wales. He had a tenuous colonial future. To maintain that hope, he had the wit never to be given on a magistrate’s order what cynics called ‘a present of a red shirt’—a flogging. The chance of reunion with Esther, the only partner permitted to him by Irish custom and Catholic doctrine, became
a powerful motive for ‘good behaviour.’ So in Sydney, clerks began to count the years, as the convict tallied sheep. It was nearly an endurable life.

  We do not know what convict servants such as Larkin, drinking black tea by the fires of their huts, wrapped in coats of skinned possums or kangaroos, listening to the high winter winds of Monaro, said of Bradley. But the remoteness of his holdings probably influenced his treatment of them. Bradley’s pastoral headquarters in Monaro lay more than 100 miles south of the nearest police magistrate. If Bradley wished to take legal vengeance on one of his workers, it would require a journey of three or four days’ duration. If he or his overseer executed punishment informally with fist, knout, or stopping of rations, they had to be sure that it was all seen as appropriate by the convicts, or else risk that their workers would rebel or abscond, and livestock be harmed.

  Alexander Harris, a footloose young Englishman who worked in Australia for seventeen years, saw how pastoralist and convict shepherd might compromise. A master visited a hut and noticed without creating a fuss an illicitly killed and hung sheep. That, he thought, made the master a sensible man. And yet Harris also visited a farm where the convicts told him they had been starved. On the Goulburn plains, wrote Harris, ‘the masters seem generally to be in very bad odour with their men, excepting only the young natives who have land there.’