A Child's Book of True Crime

by Chloe Hooper

  Lifeline: What makes you sure he’s being unfaithful?

  Margot: I’ve just, I’ve just seen them . . .

  Lifeline: You’ve seen them together? In a motel room? Speak up a little . . . Were they copulating?

  Margot [almost inaudibly]: Yes.

  Lifeline: You’re sure you’re not just imagining things?

  Terence, on reading this, sighed. He knew sexual jealousy could produce pronounced physiological effects. In one university study a group of married women was selected, and electrodes were placed on the corrugater muscle in the brow, which contracted when they frowned; skin conductance, or sweating, was also tested, as was heart rate. The women were then shown doctored footage of their spouses’ infidelities. As the forged evidence became more graphic their frowns increased by 7.09 units of contraction, the women sweated 4.02 microsiemens, and their heart rates accelerated by nearly ten beats per second, equivalent to drinking sixteen cups of coffee in one sitting. Terence read on, fearing the worst.

  Lifeline: Well, this probably isn’t the first time.

  Margot: I beg your pardon?

  Lifeline: He’s probably had a finger in more than one pie for a while. The same thing happened to me. I was married for thirty years. I went away, for one week, to nurse my dying mother, and my husband started getting his end wet with a twenty-five-year-old waitress from down the street.

  Margot: How dare she? How dare she?

  Lifeline [sighing]: At first I was beside myself too, but life goes on. You’ve just got to get back on the horse . . . I find the work I do here, using my experiences to help other women, extremely gratifying . . . Are you there? . . . Hello? . . . Hello? Oh! She seems to have hung up.

  TREMBLING, I WALKED further along a road I didn’t know. Here, just 150 years ago, you could be sentenced to death for stealing a sheep. During public hangings the doomed man would stand on the gallows dressed in his convict’s uniform, part gray, part canary yellow, the fool’s costume on a pack of cards; and he would be jubilant, indeed triumphant, at having been granted an exit from this hell. It was hard to believe that my grandparents’ grandparents were in the crowd watching the man laugh. My grandparents’ generation certainly didn’t speak of it: they were still touched by the stain. My parents’ generation didn’t speak of it because they had not been told. And at school my classmates and I didn’t find this history the slightest bit related to us; even if it was, we didn’t really care. Some of my friends at university got paid to welcome international visitors to the airport wearing convict costumes. We thought the joke was on the tourists.

  With Lillian Hurnell’s grudging approval I’d organized a field trip to Port Arthur for the fourth- and fifth-graders; some of the children’s mothers, including Veronica, kindly volunteered to join us. Murder at Black Swan Point was newly released. She was a local celebrity, and I had no idea how much she knew.

  The children and I were waiting for the bus when Mrs. Marne arrived, and we all stopped to look. She moved so smoothly, just an inch above the pavement. She seemed shy, her eyes averted to avoid some spotlight’s glare. Gold bracelets rolled down her pale arms as she ran her fingers through her mane. “Lucien just adores you,” she told me honey-voiced. “When I was little I prayed for a beautiful young teacher.” She sat on one of the children’s undersized benches, her long limbs collapsed by her side. It was as if she was dozy with her own charisma; she’d ingested it in pill form, finding it too strong. Lucien stood next to her protectively, while the other children played chasey around them.

  The kids had dressed for the day in ripped jeans and stained T-shirts. There were a few pickpockets; a few forgers; and a number who claimed to have been sent down for food-related crimes. The gourmands sympathized with hungry Thomas Chaddick, who “did pluck up, spoil and destroy” twelve cucumbers. The coquettes had committed crimes similar to James Grace, an eleven-year-old who’d stolen ten yards of ribbon and a pair of silk stockings. Danielle had brought to school talcum powder and a mascara wand; so a subset of the female convicts was pale and beauty-spotted, although there was no mention of underage harlots. Girls were really only bit players in local convict history. Women were sent down to Van Diemen’s Land because “unnatural crimes” were rife amongst the male convicts. They were then locked up, miles from the men, in a separate Hobart penitentiary called The Female Factory. There was now a fudge factory on this site. Inside the old sandstone walls, truffles were handmade.

  When the bus arrived, Veronica rose, stretching to her full thin height. As though for the children’s benefit, she and I traded excited smiles. Veronica was wearing a beige linen pantsuit. It gave the impression she was going on a high-class safari, except that her shoes were as delicate as ballet slippers. All the other mothers, and I, wore sneakers and flannel shirts like campers. But there’d been no real need for us to dress down; we weren’t going traipsing through the bush and I wished I’d made an effort too. Veronica and another mother sat at the front of the bus, chatting at low volume. I strained to hear what they were saying, but was partnered with Henry Ledder, who’d been misbehaving. Henry had his front teeth blacked, and claimed to have stolen two spoons like his great-great-great-grandfather. We’d been driving for a while before I turned to him: “What’s the worst thing a person can do?”

  “The worst thing?” Henry mused. “To go to jail after shooting someone.” He didn’t quite know how to differentiate the crime from the punishment. This was referred to as the preconventional stage of moral development, typifying the moral world of children under nine, and many adult criminal offenders.

  “What’s the worst thing that happens to children?” I asked, immediately realizing the question’s impropriety.

  “Dominic’s mother was looking out the window, and she saw a little kid being chopped up,” Henry told me wide-eyed, “all into little pieces, just down on the street.”

  “What did Dominic’s mother do?”

  “She screamed.”

  “Henry, that’s not true!”

  “They saw it. Well maybe they didn’t see it happen, but they saw the remains.”

  He actually said remains. Attempting to change the subject, I asked, “What’s the worst thing that happens to kids on TV?”

  “A bad boy turns into a dog,” Henry advised quickly, as if reciting multiplication tables.

  “Oh!” I poked him lightly, trying to recast this chat as something jolly. “Dominic’s mother never saw that. And you’ll transform into a dog yourself if you tell such silly stories!” Henry looked confused. Children’s sense of the political world was usually fairly abstract. In an American study it was found candy store attendants were considered to be government employees by at least 70 percent of kindergarten students; a policeman, after the president, was believed to hold the most power.

  • • •

  We pulled up at Port Arthur. The remains of the penal settlement looked ancient, but each ruined monument was still Georgian in ideal. Convict-made bricks, the colors of the cliffs, rose to form a neat village of half-buildings. The church’s steeple was long gone and birds darted through the bell tower. In the penitentiary, yellow daisies and milk-thistle carpeted the cells’ floors. None of the buildings had a ceiling, just high brick walls, with crude windows framing the most uncanny views: serene Opossum Bay; rolling green hills; an English country garden of weeping willows, hollyhocks, and snapdragon, planted by the homesick officers. The remnants of this gentrified Port Arthur could stun you. It was like stumbling upon an Arcadia with only the whipbird, its long high cry and sudden note change, reminding you of the horror that existed here.

  After the complex was closed down in the 1870s, the local community hoped to transform Port Arthur into a health resort, “the Brighton of the Australias,” but the damp weather proved off-putting. Instead two pianos were put in the penitentiary’s dining hall, and some nights people danced until day broke. Young couples arrived with picnics and all the ladies squealed as their beaux pretended to lock them
in the cells. Day-trippers visited by the hundred, and this tourism funded jetties and new roads. Then bushfires swept through, and the settlement burned to the ground. When, in The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes prisons as “the black flowers of civilization,” he could have been describing the charred remains of the convict boys’ cabinetmaking, their hand-carved church pews turned to cinders.

  Inside the cultural center was a re-creation of a convict ship’s hulk. A tape played creaking bottom-of-the-boat sounds, with ominous cockney mutterings thrown in for full effect. A display board, nailed to the ship’s wall, used visual props to contrast the convicts’ crimes with their punishments. Life for stealing a flute: an educator had attached some CDs with a glue gun. Seven years for stealing tobacco: a carton of cigarettes had been stuck on; but by now, all were pilfered. Life for stealing a watch: there was the glue outline of a watch from before it was ripped down. “This is all very progressive,” Veronica observed, sidling up to me. She had a face drawn in light. “We learned nothing at all, nothing.” Reaching over she brushed something out of my hair. “A little bit of twig . . . now all gone.” She smiled a pursed-lipped smile, her chin crinkling.

  The Endport Primary classes were split into smaller groups. Veronica finessed that she and I would be in one group, and we were led away, accompanied by ten children. Our guide, Malcolm, was about my age, tall and thin, with dark shoulder-length hair kept untidy to disguise a baby face. He wore a three-piece suit and a high white collar like an old-fashioned undertaker. He seemed to lead from his knees, his legs long streaks of black. Two by two, the children—carrying their worksheets—followed him out amongst the ruins. Veronica and I, walking next to each other, trailed behind.

  “Malcolm’s cute,” Veronica whispered. “If I were young and single, I’d pounce.”

  I laughed.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” I replied, a little defensively. “Not really.”

  “Well, there’s hardly rich pickings in Endport,” she whispered. “Get his number!”

  I laughed again, nervously: even if I hadn’t been having an affair with her husband, this sort of conversation would have made me uncomfortable. It was not as though historically I’d had a lot of success with men my own age. I didn’t always find them easy to talk to. I guessed they were just immature. Plus, they seemed to find me really intense and weird. Like the Eleanor Siddell of my imagination, I went to an all-girls’ school from age four to eighteen. I kissed a boy for the first time at a party when I was seventeen and unfortunately it turned out he was a kleptomaniac. Apparently he’d steal other boys’ books, then stand in the queue at the school’s secondhand bookshop, whiting out the owners’ names with correction fluid. One day the fluid didn’t dry in time, and he was suspended. I didn’t know about this until I came to school on the Monday morning after the party, and all the girls lined up asking me if I’d happened to see their gold earrings, or their mother’s purse: items, they claimed, he’d probably stolen. Sometimes I’d see that boy around, but I never spoke to him again. Later people said he had gone to jail.

  Malcolm took us inside the museum, a building originally built for the insane—he explained that a lot of convicts went insane after being left too long in the dumb-cells, a form of solitary confinement without any light. On display was a secret society of forgotten objects: a yellowing collection of pressed seaweed once belonging to the minister’s wife; the remains of some convicts’ shoes; a whalebone walking stick; an emu leg. Malcolm led the children to a wall showing off a range of torturers’ equipment: leg irons; a vast selection of balls and chains; muskets and pistols.

  The convict ship Isabella, he told us, arrived in 1834 with the first load of boy convicts bound for the children’s prison opposite Port Arthur—Point Puer. The boys had all arrived drunk, having broken into a store of wine in the ship’s hold meant for the officers. Once they’d sobered up they were trained as bakers, carpenters, sawyers, tailors, shoemakers. “They were schooled very slightly, encouraged to repent, and punished.” Malcolm pointed to a cat-o’-nine-tails. “This whip would be soaked in brine to make the leather tougher.” He spoke softly in a lilt, the way people do in Irish folksongs. He had told his stories many times before and now he paused with slightly manufactured woe, or rushed through dreadful details as though no longer interested. A silver ring of Celtic design, on his middle finger, flashed as he gestured; “Two lashes took the skin off to the bone, but transgressors could be sentenced to up to three hundred lashes. All the skin on a man’s back would be flying in the breeze.” Malcolm’s eyes were bright. “He would go to the infirmary with the scarlet scars of the cat. They’d take a bandage off someone else, dunk it in cold water, then reuse it on him.”

  “Malcolm’s nervous,” Veronica told me. “I think he likes you.”

  “Nooo,” I said blushing.

  She giggled. “Ye-es.”

  “Well, it’s great he’s not mollycoddling the kids,” I conceded. “He’s talking to them like to short adults.” I sighed. In art the day before, the children had each made a “silver tray” by gluing string onto a piece of cardboard, and covering it with aluminum foil. The art teacher had gotten this idea from an American book on pioneers—you could also make a rag rug or homemade cough drops. I thought this sent out mixed messages. The convict children learned trades, but not silversmithing. And how many Tasmanian pioneers had the gentility to make themselves cough drops? It was enough just to be consumptive; they didn’t need to accessorize.

  Malcolm explained to us that at Point Puer there was Sir George’s set of rules, obviously, but there were also the boys’ shadow rules. A terrifying natural order emerged. Malcolm turned on a torch, despite the now plentiful sunlight, and shone it in the children’s faces. “There was a black economy, and the boys would try to steal from the colonial officials’ houses to gain advantage. John Pollard!”—he pointed the torch at Alastair—“was charged with being absent from Divine Service without authority, the Catechist’s house having been broken into. William Bowles!”—he targeted Henry—“was charged with having buttons improperly in his possession and being suspected of gambling. William Cummins! He must have benefited from an illicit exchange, only to spend four days in solitary confinement on bread and water for having a pipe and tobacco in his possession improperly and smoking near the Superintendent’s Quarters.” Malcolm’s voice grew low with suspense. “As Sir George’s system became underfunded and overfull, even the pettiest misdemeanor invited punishment.” He paused. “The boys lied to anyone in any position of authority, they sang hymns like banshees. At night, they would turn out the lights and attack their convict watchmen, pouring the contents of the chamber pots over their heads. In one scuffle, a guard was hospitalized for three months.” Malcolm shone the torch under his own chin. “Another time, a man died.”

  Pleased by this, the children strolled around filling in their worksheets. Veronica stood looking in the display cases, tilting her head different ways as if each sorry item needed to be considered from all perspectives. I followed her example: what struck me as the museum’s strangest exhibit was a re-creation of what a cell for the insane would have been like. There was a door and you bent down and opened a little flap to see a wax dummy, dressed up as a convict, standing—there was only room to stand—wearing a ball and chain. “Convicts were only taken out of the dumb-cells, in hoods, to go to church.”

  I turned. Malcolm was standing behind me. I blushed as he pointed to a leather mask. “Flies crawled over their faces. Officers stood up the front of the chapel making sure the convicts’ lips moved only in prayer.”

  I bent to look again, flattered by this attention. Now people had started throwing coins into the mock cell. The whole of the floor was covered with twenty-cent pieces. “Do you think they were thrown in out of sympathy?” I asked. “Or to make a wish?” There was something awful about the silver lying there, shining its promise before a mannequin, which stood in for someone
who had been mute.

  Malcolm cleared his throat. “It’s money standing in for shit.”

  I looked at him surprised, but thought of one of the children’s running conversations.

  Lucien: My dad believes, and I think it’s a very sensible idea, that not God, but a being that is bigger than God, created us for his amusement. Umm, that guy might invite one of his friends around just for a brief play with us, and one of their days could be like several million years for us.

  Eliza: The world began when God made a big bang!

  Lucien: How could a bang do anything? I think of a giant holding an ant farm and he’s looking down; any second that giant could go, “Ah no, that’s a big no-no.” Pqueew! “Bye-bye!” And then it’s suddenly like your back’s broken in two by some unknown force.

  Eliza: We can believe what we want!

  Lucien: A bang would do nothing!

  Billy: Wait! I think they should see how many countries believe in God and have an election.

  We broke for lunch and I ushered the kids outside. Veronica strolled next to her son, but neither of them spoke. For Lucien there was clearly a mix of pleasure and humiliation in having his beautiful mother present. He was proud of her, but it was embarrassing the other children should see her trying to feed him—the class gothic—a salmon and avocado sandwich. It was also embarrassing that she should witness his lack of popularity. I had begun to suspect the class mailbox had evolved into nothing more than a mechanism for spreading malice toward him. The little girls opened up notes and dissolved into mean giggles; the same giggles as when he walked through the door each morning. They all had crushes on him. He was Byronic; at nine years, with his curled lip and knowledge of Hell, he appreciated the tropes of the greatest romantics, and even I wanted to meet up with him again, when he was twenty-one, to talk about the cosmos.