For me, this is the final piece of evidence that confirms the Makins were convicted of the death of the wrong child. Twice, once during the inquest into the death of Baby D and once during her trial, Sarah ‘swore’ that this child was not Amber Murray’s and that Baby Horace had been taken to Macdonaldtown. The evidence given by Clarice and Daisy at the inquest into Baby D’s death—that Baby Horace had been one of the six babies taken to Burren Street—corroborates what appeared to be, at the time, Sarah’s dramatic but empty denials. Clarice’s later retraction of this statement and her remarkable denial that she gave such evidence points to where the truth really lay.
Some will argue that all this evidence comes as it does from a family keen to protect itself. But Clarice’s original evidence exposed her parents to, rather than protected them from, more criminal charges. What are we to make of John’s letter when on previous occasions he had been ready to take the gallows? Perhaps he wrote the letter to reassure his family who were left to carry the shame of his actions. Yet the letter is not a complete exoneration—John’s admission that ‘the body found was buried in the yard weeks before we got her child’ indicates he was the one who buried Baby D. If he was trying to salve his conscience, protect his wife and reassure his family, this admission was an odd way to do it.
If John’s assertions were true, it is ironic that he died because he had been convicted of the murder of the wrong baby. Does it matter? Presumably, the administration of justice works best if defendants are convicted of deaths they have actually caused. But most people will be satisfied with this outcome of rough justice. The Makins may not have murdered Baby Horace but they were clearly in the business of burying an awful lot of children.
What is easy to forget is the charge that was never prosecuted against the Makins—the manslaughter of Baby Mignonette, the daughter of Minnie Davies and Horace Bothamley. The evidence that proved she had died as a result of starvation, even though the Makins had been paid ten shillings a week to nurse her, was irrefutable. Her starvation was probably deliberate since she had been a healthy baby when her devoted parents handed her to the Makins but ended her life as ‘a mere bag of bones’.
It is no wonder that John accepted his fate with composure. But Sarah’s was to be a long and drawn out struggle for survival in the notorious Darlinghurst Gaol and the more distant Bathurst Gaol. On the day John died, Sarah’s journey as one of the longest serving prisoners in New South Wales had barely begun.
PART IV
SARAH MAKIN, REFORMED WOMAN
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
From convict daughter to convict
30 March 1893–29 April 1911
The construction of Darlinghurst Gaol began 23 years before Sarah Makin was born, while New South Wales was in its convict heyday—in the midst of a construction boom and buoyed by the slave labour of newly arriving convicts. A four acre site on the elevated land of Darlinghurst ‘was chosen so that its imposing walls would be a constant reminder to the residents of Sydney that it was a Penal Colony’.1 What had been a significant cultural site for the original Cadigal tribe before white settlement2 was turned into a sinister cultural site for the new British colony, with many of the local Aboriginal population being later imprisoned in the gaol.
Although construction began in 1822 under the authority of Governor Brisbane, the labour of convicts was slow and money throughout Sydney’s colonial history waxed and waned as governors balanced precarious budgets. Funds for the construction of two of the cell-blocks (A and D Wings) were not available until 12 years later and it was another four years before they were completed. So it was not until 7 June 1841 that the prisoners housed in Sydney Gaol occupied Sydney’s brand new and comparatively luxurious gaol.3
Darlinghurst Gaol was a world away from the inhumane conditions of Sydney Gaol, which was so crowded that up to 300 prisoners were housed in two small dormitories, 32 by 22 feet each. Not all the prisoners could sleep on the floors at any one time so that ‘many were obliged either to take their turn of standing during the night, or to be on top of others’.4 During a Royal Commission into the administration of the colony in 1820,5 Commissioner Bigge recommended the building of a new gaol to address the lack of space in existing gaols and the hulks anchored in the harbour which arose from the colony’s obsession with imprisoning children, the mentally ill, drunks, vagrants, debt defaulters, the sick and the aged.
One wonders what the 119 male prisoners of the old Sydney Gaol thought as they were marched from Lower George Street, ‘manacled and chained’, along Macquarie Street under the eyes of their 50 police guards to the imposing sandstone structure that greeted them in Darlinghurst.6 They were followed by 50 female prisoners dressed in shapeless black dresses who were ‘jeered and pelted . . . with fruit’ by the crowd that followed the prisoners’ procession.7
When Darlinghurst Gaol was finally completed in 1885, seven years before the Makins were driven through its grand gates in a black police van, it was an architectural masterpiece based on a radial design.8 Inside, a circular chapel stood in the middle, an obvious visual and symbolic focal point for the prisoners. Six rectangular cell-blocks and an observation wing radiate out from the chapel, like spokes on a wheel, with all eyes on the house of God and final retribution, or the pathway to redemption. The open plan design of the gaol was broken up by high stone walls separating each cell-block, dividing the wheel into segments, with the yard of each cell-block surveyed by warders in watchboxes.
When the Makins were first imprisoned in November 1892, they would have been ‘taken straight down the stairs to the basement of the governor’s quarters’ then marched through an underground tunnel to the basement of the chapel and the bathing house where they were stripped, bathed, fumigated and examined by the gaol doctor. Deprived of their clothing and possessions, they were dressed in prison garb before John was taken to A Wing for men and Sarah to D Wing for women, the two windowless cell-blocks on either side of the governor’s elegant sandstone residence.9
Housed in separate wings, Sarah and John would have had no contact, other than perhaps glimpsing each other on Sundays in the chapel where the women were segregated from the men in a gallery on the top level. When the guards were not looking, men and women threw notes in calico-wrapped parcels to each other during church services, or over the walls that separated the women’s wing from the men’s.10
Sarah served her time in three different gaols, Darlinghurst, Bathurst and Long Bay, with her health worsening over time. She was unlike other female prisoners, since most were incarcerated for short periods of time for petty crimes such as drunkenness, vagrancy, petty theft, ‘riotous behaviour, indecent language or for having no visible means of support’, a euphemism for prostitution.11 With the New South Wales colony just a couple of generations from the end of transportation, which officially ceased in 1849, Sarah, a convict daughter, spent her years living in spartan conditions that surely reminded her of where her father had come from.
Life in gaol
When Sarah began her life as a convict, gaols were, at least, no longer houses of death because of reform in the years since transportation had ended which saw improvements to health, hygiene, sewerage, food and exercise, so much so that the death rate in Darlinghurst Gaol had dropped to less than the death rate for the general population from 1889 onwards.12 For many prisoners who had been pickled in poverty, it was the first time they had proper clothing and three meals a day.13
In 1905, a new system of rations was introduced based on the industriousness of prisoners. This system ‘had a marked effect on the industry of prisoners. Now that the ration is regulated by amount of work done, instead of time served, even the loafer finds that he must work’.14 A daily hard labour ration consisted of bread (24 ounces), maize meal (6 ounces), meat (16 ounces) vegetables (16 ounces), salt, sugar (1 ounce), soap (½ ounce) and rice or barley (¼ ounce).15
All of this stands in contrast to Henry Lawson’s description of the gaol as ‘Starvinghurst Gaol�
� in his poem One Hundred and Three.16 Lawson was first gaoled in 1905 for his failure to pay alimony to his estranged wife, who had sought a legal separation from him17, while his second sojourn in Darlinghurst Gaol was for child desertion in 1908. Suffering from manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder), he spent time in the Darlinghurst Mental Hospital for drunkenness and depression.18 Perhaps his bleak tag of ‘Starvinghurst Gaol’ was merely the pessimistic view of a depressed man with his stark confession that:
They take the spoon from the cell at night—and a stranger might
think it odd;
But a man might sharpen it on the floor, and go to his own Great
God
While Lawson may have been describing the sheer blandness of a diet of ‘bread and water and hominy, and a scag of meat and a spud’ or exaggerating the conditions in gaol (‘Tis slow starvation in separate cells’) as suggested by medical historian Philip Norrie,19 some of the events he describes in the gaol hold a grain of truth since all prisoners sentenced to three years or more spent the first nine months in solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water, with only an hour a day for exercise:20
In all the creeds there is hope and doubt, but of this there is no
doubt;
That starving prisoners faint in church, and the warders carry
them out.
. . .
The press is printing its smug, smug lies, and paying its shameful
debt—
It speaks of the comforts that prisoners have, and ‘holidays’
prisoners get.
The visitors come with their smug, smug smiles through the gaol
on a working day,
And the public hears with its large, large ears what authorities have
to say.
They lay their fingers on well-hosed walls, and they tread on the
polished floor;
They peep in the generous shining cans with their ration Number
Four.
And the visitors go with their smug, smug smiles; the reporters’
work is done;
Stand up! my men, who have done your time on ration Number
One!
Ration number four was the generous one available for men doing hard labour, while number one was for those in solitary confinement. Lawson refers to the ‘living dead’ and uses the word ‘starving’, ‘starved’ or ‘starvation’ eight times in his poem, highlighting how the unfair rations system affected all prisoners. Punishment also involved starvation rations, as did infringements of prison rules:
He shall be buried alive without meat, for a day and a night
unheard
If he speak to a fellow prisoner, though he die for want of a word.
He shall be punished, and he shall be starved, and he shall in
darkness rot,
He shall be murdered body and soul—and God said, ‘Thou shalt
not!’
While Lawson described deaths in Darlinghurst Gaol due to lack of food, the death rate was a concern for the prison administrators. The provision of proper clothes and shoes, bedding in separate cells to prevent cross-infection, medical care, isolation wards for infectious diseases, as well as ‘medical comforts’ in the form of port wine, brandy and extra food for sick prisoners, was aimed at keeping the death rate as low as possible.21
The inmates of Darlinghurst Gaol were also allowed daily exercise and a weekly bath with clean water. Along with a proper sewerage system, installed in 1891, these measures were designed to improve hygiene in the gaol.22 The downside was that the gaol, built to house 420 prisoners and staff, had 732 inmates by 1900. The gaol was so plagued by lice and bed-bugs that it was nicknamed ‘Lousy Bay’ and ‘The Booby Hatch’.
In addition to living with ‘the horrible plague of boobies’ which infested the gaol in the 1890s23, Lawson’s poems provide a picture of the lonely life that Sarah would have known. Each prisoner was housed in a four by eight foot cell which was ‘double-lock[ed] at four o’clock’ with window slits for air and ‘[n]o light save the lights in the yard beneath the clustering lights of the Lord’. With the ‘bang’ of the iron door, the ‘clank’ of the iron bolt, and the last contemptuous objections of some (‘an ignorant oath for a last good-night—or the voice of a filthy thought’), the prisoners were locked in darkness from early afternoon until the next morning in their tiny cells to stare at the ‘dead stone walls’. Rather than on mattresses, they slept in hammocks. In the morning, the prisoners would:
rise at six, when the bell rings, and roll our blankets neat,
Then we pace the cell unseeing—till seven, with hypnotised feet.24
During solitary confinement, writing and reading were not permitted, a terrible punishment for a man like Lawson, who wrote prodigiously. Lawson’s poem, ‘written on scraps of paper with a stump of pencil stolen from the prison printery’ and smuggled out of the gaol by his friends,25 describes prisoners left to rot from idleness:
Warders and prisoners all alike in a dead rot dry and slow—
The author must not write for his own, and the tailor must not sew.
The billet-bound officers dare not speak and discharged men dare
not tell
Though many and many an innocent man must brood in this
barren hell.
Since most of the wings housed male prisoners, there was significant overcrowding in the women’s wing, so that by 1886 there were 450 female inmates in a wing that had been designed to accommodate 156. In 1896, when Sarah was one of the female inmates, one visitor to Darlinghurst Gaol described the women’s dismal conditions:
Their work is solely that of scrubbing, cleaning, washing and needlework of the most hideous and dreary description. After working at needlework from 9–12, then 2–4, they were compelled to go to bed at 5 pm. They were locked up with no lighting. They could not work in the workshops, garden or use the library as the men could do, nor could they use the schoolroom.26
According to Lawson, the prisoners’ lives were bound by ‘Rules, regulations—red-tape and rules’, including enforced marching under the eyes of the warders around the exercise yard and long hours of work. But it was the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, which included the forced wearing of a hood over a prisoner’s entire face during their one hour of exercise,27 that sent many prisoners mad:
You get the gaol-dust in your throat, in your skin the dead gaol-white;
You get the gaol-whine in your voice and in every letter you write.
And in your eyes comes the bright gaol-light—not the glare of the
world’s distraught,
Not the hunted look, nor the guilty look, but the awful look of the
Caught.
For those who did go mad, B Wing awaited them with its medieval restraints, including a leather straitjacket and ‘a conical wooden device, hollowed out in the middle, forced into prisoners’ mouths to prevent them from speaking or calling out, and secured with leather straps and a buckle behind the head’.28
Perhaps Sarah was astute enough to avoid the torture devices of B Wing. But after 18 long years as an inmate of various gaols, Sarah’s hunted and guilty look during her trial probably became ‘the awful look of the Caught’.
The lonely prison years–health and other problems
After her conviction on 10 March 1893, Sarah was moved from the remand section of Darlinghurst Gaol to begin her period of solitary confinement. But Sarah only spent five more months in Darlinghurst Gaol before being sent to Bathurst Gaol on Thursay 10 August 1893, an extra punishment for her and her family because of its distance from Sydney. Bathurst Gaol was a similar vintage to Darlinghurst Gaol. Although building commenced in 1837, it was not completed until 1888 and provided similar living conditions to Darlinghurst Gaol. Sarah arrived after an overnight train journey and stayed for nearly two years.29
Before her journey to Bathurst, she asked to see John, since she had been told he was to be executed on the foll
owing Tuesday. On Thursday afternoon, 10 August, her wish was granted:
she was escorted to the condemned cell, where man and wife kissed each other fervently. Neither had anything to say, and in a few moments Mrs. Makin was removed in a hysterical state just as she used to carry on during the inquest.
The journalist who reported this visit was suspicious, remarking that:
[w]hen she reached the train she was quite composed, and chatted away as if nothing had transpired—a fact which proves that in many instances her hysterical seizures were more or less assumed.30
John’s imminent execution and Sarah’s volatile mental state may have been the reason for her transfer. Sarah’s presence in the gaol at the time when John was executed would have been an extra punishment, perhaps tipping Sarah into one of her irrational and yet completely misunderstood emotional states.
By 1893, Sarah had been infected with syphilis for more than ten years. While not every infected person will develop tertiary syphilis—the final and most life-threatening phase of the disease—Sarah’s fits of ‘hysteria’ suggest she was in the final stage of syphilis and suffering from neurosyphilis. Neurosyphilis has several forms and occurs in about 10 per cent of untreated syphilitics. About 10 per cent of neurosyphilis is caused by meningovascular syphilis, or MVS, which ‘occurs as a result of damage to the blood vessels of the meninges, brain and spinal cord . . . causing a wide spectrum of neuro-logic impairments’.31 Sarah could also have suffered damage to the cortical regions of her brain which would have caused impairment of memory and speech, irritability, personality changes and psychotic symptoms.
The Baby Farmers Page 26