A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  In raw and rowdy early Sydney, convict men and women, soldiers, free settlers and visiting seamen mingled and mixed, carousing and gambling and enjoying the attractions of town life, particularly in areas such as The Rocks. They often re-established patterns of association – for good or ill – brought with them from home. But as the convict population grew, so too did the persistent problems of drunkenness, violence, prostitution and crime.

  Governors Hunter and King had grappled with the problem of regulating convicts’ employment outside government service, and King had introduced a schedule of payments that could be received by convicts for set tasks. Upon his arrival in New South Wales, Macquarie reasserted the rule of law after the chaos of the Bligh rebellion and set about reining in the labour-market freedoms tolerated by his predecessors. In Macquarie’s new order, the servant status of convicts was to be clearly defined, and their ease of movement and freedom of association and employment within in the town of Sydney were to be radically curtailed.

  Macquarie’s steering hand was often hindered by forces far beyond his control. He knew little detail of the troubles back home and the increased flow of convicts that resulted until the transports appeared in Port Jackson loaded to their miserable gunwales. Worse still, floods along the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers had repeatedly ravaged productive lowland farms, and plagues of caterpillars blighted already struggling crops. Unable to feed their labourers and servants, farmers returned their assigned convicts to the government labour pool. They all needed to be housed, fed, clothed and put to work, and inevitably many ended up back in Sydney, there to mingle with the mass of new arrivals.

  However expedient the indulgence of allowing convicts to roam virtually free in the early years, ‘the rapid Increase of Population’, had, in Macquarie’s words, ‘rendered it in Some Degree the source of many Evils’.3 In 1814, he issued orders that convicts were to be restricted to one master and one place, and if that master was unable, either through a lack of money or a lack of appropriate tasks, to occupy that convict fully, then they were to be returned to the government for reassignment.

  But the perceived and customary rights of convicts from 30 years of colonial living were ingrained in the social fabric of early Sydney. Consequently, Macquarie’s early control measures were widely flouted and proved largely ineffectual; restricting the freedom of convicts outside their designated working hours would require physical rather than regulatory restraints. A monumental building to control the convict population appeared the governor’s best option.

  Macquarie first floated with Bathurst in 1814 the idea of a central building to house convicts, and ‘A Barrack for Male Convicts’ was second on his ‘List of Essentially Necessary Public Buildings’ of New Year’s Day 1817.4 Greenway was soon instructed to design a building to house 600 male convicts – both men and boys – to be erected at the north-eastern end of Hyde Park and adjacent to the hospital. Similar barracks were planned at Windsor and Parramatta. A memo for 28 March of that year noted that ‘the Foundation of the new Barrack … was commenced digging this Day!’5

  In December 1817, Macquarie again wrote of the project to Bathurst:

  A new very large Commodious Barrack for the Accommodation of about 400 Convicts is Now Erecting at Sydney by Government Artificers, and I hope will be Completed in about Six Months hence, to be enclosed by a High Stone Wall; this Building is Much required, and I trust will be productive of many Good Consequences, as to the personal Comfort and Improvement of the Morals of the Male Convicts in the immediate Service of Government at Sydney.6

  As the Sydney Living Museums management plan for what is now an imposing survivor of the convict era notes, the barracks were to become a ‘powerful symbol of change in the colony of New South Wales’. They were soon seen as ‘both a sign of sweeping changes in the management of convicts and a clear statement of permanence and authority by the governor’.7

  The building was to provide compulsory shelter by night for all male convicts working as government-assigned labourers within the vicinity of Sydney. Under Macquarie’s plan, convicts assigned to gangs on government buildings, wharves, roads, bridges, land clearing and the like would work through both the morning and the afternoon. There would be no time left for additional unregulated employment. The men would return to the barracks by sunset each day and be mustered at sunrise the following morning. They were to be fed and clothed, and disciplined as necessary within the confines of the barrack compound. While ever they were behind its nine feet six inch–high perimeter walls they would be under constant surveillance, searched on entry for illicit grog or weapons, and on departure for property belonging to His Majesty’s government hidden about their person.

  Yet the barracks were never intended as a gaol. Convicts were confined each night and the gates to the barrack yard locked, but if their behaviour proved satisfactory, they were allowed out on weekends to engage in their own pursuits. On Saturdays they were permitted to find work of their own around Sydney, and after compulsory attendance at church on Sunday they were at leisure in the town. Married men of good character were to be allowed to lodge outside the barracks but return each day for the morning muster.

  In return for working a full day for the government there were compensations. Food rations were increased by half, and all clothing, shoes and incidentals were provided. Tickets of leave were promised to well-behaved men after a year in the barracks, provided they had already served three years of their original sentence. They would then also be allowed to live, with certain restrictions, at a place of their choosing in the town. But any abuse of the regulations meant the immediate loss of privileges and liberty, with the bite of the lash the inevitable consequence.

  So would Macquarie’s monumental edifice, and the regulations that set the tone for its management, bring the convict populace willingly to order and regimentation after years of laissez-faire living? It seems the governor’s judgment in building the barracks did prove both perceptive and wise, if the reaction of the first intake of inmates was anything to go by. He appeared to strike the right balance between incentive and reward on the one hand, and discipline and control on the other. On 4 June 1819, the auspicious occasion of the celebrations marking the birthday of George III, Macquarie wrote in his diary:

  At 1 O’Clock today … I went to the Convict Barrack, accompanied by Lt. Govr. Erskine, Mr. Judge Advocate Wylde, Mr. Justice Field, Major Druitt, and my own Family, to see the Convicts sit down to their first Dinner, according to the New System, in the new elegant Barrack in Hyde Park.

  This was a most highly gratifying and interesting sight; no less than 589 Convicts having sat down to a most excellent Dinner; Plum Pudding and an allowance of Punch being allowed to them, in addition to their regular meal on this auspicious Day. – I addressed them in a short plain speech, and was followed by Mr. Judge Advocate Wylde on one more at length. – Mrs. M. and myself, and the Friends who accompanied us drank to their Health & Prosperity.

  They all appeared very happy and contented, and gave us three Cheers on our coming away.8

  So too might the barracks’ architect have been happy and contented that providential day. Pleased and proud of his substantial achievement and its mark on the urban and moral fabric of the town, Macquarie favoured Francis Greenway with an absolute pardon – number 352, dated on the King’s birthday and duly ‘delivered by His Excellency the Govr’. The viceroy handed his architect his signed ticket of re-entry to society, a precious document that was both a personal accolade, and a symbol of the moral and social worth of Macquarie’s paternalistic policies. The convicted felon, sentenced to death some nine years before, could now aspire to the life of an unfettered emissary of the civilising arts in the brutish netherworld of penal New South Wales.

  Macquarie would later qualify his enthusiasm and the reasoning behind the pardon by acknowledging ‘that very pleasant and genteel woman’ Mary Greenway, who had made an ‘earnest entreaty’ for her husband’s freedom. That ticket to freed
om made ‘them both still more eligible for being received into good and genteel society’.9 Francis and Mary could now be welcomed at the governor’s own table. Redeemed and returned to the bosom of society as much as any emancipist could hope for, surely the apogee of Greenway’s life and career was at hand? But at such a moment the Bible might be invoked, with ‘pride’ and ‘fall’ contained within the one sentence. The fruits of freedom would ripen and then assuredly wither as Francis Howard Greenway turned his back on his nefarious past. As Ellis put it, his convict brothers ‘from now on, through long, irksome nights, would feel the yoke of servitude within the walls of [his] symmetrical creation … Did Mr Greenway give them a pitying thought that day? It is doubtful if he did, for he was no longer one of them’.10

  The barracks would grow ever more prominent in Greenway’s memory, and they soon became a towering achievement, his achievement. He later claimed that the building would have cost £30 600 ‘at least’, had the work been subject to a contract. But under his expert direction, the project ‘cost the Government only £10,000, having been carried into effect by Government mechanics’.11 Greenway – or his literary doppelgänger, an ‘architectural correspondent’ – invoked a dubious comparison with London’s Millbank Prison. Built on the banks of the Thames, Millbank ‘cost the public upwards of half a million of money, unhealthy and miserable as it is’, and housed no more inmates than the Hyde Park Barracks. Greenway’s ‘correspondent’ failed to mention, however, Millbank Prison’s disastrous location. The site was marshy, miasmic and structurally unstable; it contributed to the defeat of three architects, and its unsuitability fuelled a final cost more than double the original estimate.

  A few years previously there were no such qualms over unsound foundations or fetid humours as the Sydney Gazette of 17 July 1819 devoted a full column to Sydney’s newest edifice. Gushing in its praise, one suspects that the correspondent was none other than the architect himself:

  The Barrack recently compleated [sic] for the accommodation of the working gangs, exhibits a noble structure of admired architecture … The aspect of the building is beautiful at a distance, but at a near approach conveys an idea of towering grandeur. At the entrance gate is erected a lodge on each side, for the porter and mustering clerk; and upon entering, the whole range of buildings breaks upon the coup-d’oeil.12

  The three-storeyed ‘sleeping barrack’ – 130 feet long by 50 wide – stood in the middle of a bare yard and was divided internally into ‘12 spacious and well aired sleeping rooms’. Greenway continued:

  This building is executed conformably with the most elegant proportions of the Greek school. Opposite the entrance gate, four pilastres [sic] break nine inches before the face of the work, standing on a plinth, with a double string course under the eaves of the projecting roof, giving the appearance at some distance of a capitol [sic] to the pilastres, with an elegant entablature, they also supporting [sic] a pediment where the roof ends. In the tympanum is placed a very handsome clock, made here, which does much credit to the maker. Down the sides the range of pilastres are continued; and these being of a fine coloured stone, and the main building of brick, must be necessarily considered to produce a fine effect …

  As Broadbent and Hughes comment, the reference to stone pilasters is rather puzzling. They were actually built of brick, and this was probably ‘an early example of Greenway’s later practice of describing what he would have liked to have built, rather than [what] was actually constructed’.13 The Gazette’s correspondent continued:

  On the right of the entrance, and of the height only of the enclosing wall, stands a range of offices 300 feet in length, in the centre of which is a commodious kitchen … On each side the kitchen is a mess-room of 100 feet in length, with boxes and benches on either side for the accommodation of six persons in each box … On the opposite side [of] the quadrangle are correspondent buildings. Here the Superintendent’s apartments are provided; on one side of which is a room 91 feet long, for the reception of prisoners newly landed; on the same side is a store and bake-house; and at each of the ends are places provided for the confinement of the dissolute or refractory …

  The health and comfort of its inhabitants are the peculiar object of the establishment; and it is highly gratifying to observe, that contentment and unanimity are already obvious to those who are in command over them, and that from the great attention paid to their comforts and improvement, much good must be expected to result to the Prisoners and to the Public at large from this humane, this highly salutary, and excellent Institution. Mr. GREENWAY is the Architect.

  The function of Greenway’s ‘sleeping barrack’ was essentially simple. The building had a central corridor on each floor running its full length. Cross-corridors made way to a flight of stairs on either side of the building. Each floor was divided into four dormitories, two large rooms sleeping 60, and two smaller ones for 30 men. The men slept in hammocks slung between stout timber frames tied back to the roof trusses or the floor framing overhead.

  Commissioner Bigge was generally pleased with the barracks, remarking in his Report … into the State of the Colony of New South Wales that the main building’s style of architecture ‘is simple and handsome, and the execution of the work is solid, and promises to be durable’. However, ‘storms of wind from the south and south-west’ drove rain through gaps in the shingle roof, all ‘from want of care in working up’. Then there were the rusticated stone walls to the barrack yard: not high enough, thought Mr Bigge, their ‘leading object of security’ sacrificed so as not to affect ‘the regular proportion of the building that they enclose’. And an appraisal by the commissioner would not have been complete without his word on architectural embellishment; the walls, he concluded, were ‘executed in a style much too ornamental for the character as well as [the] destination of the principal building’.14

  But while Greenway’s building was designed to accommodate around 600, Bigge’s report mentions that up to 1000 ‘have been lodged there’. In the 1840s more than 1200 men were crammed into its dormitories. With the end of transportation in 1840, and the convict system as a whole in 1848, the building was given over to providing accommodation for unchaperoned immigrant women and children. Many of them were poor Irish orphans who bided their time in the barracks until they found employment as domestic servants and the like, while others were the families of convicts awaiting reunion. From 1862, the upper floor was appropriated for an asylum for sick and destitute women. The terminally ill from the hospital next door, the demented, the unwanted and the unloved crowded its wards. By the 1880s both upper floors were home to more than 300 patients.

  A slew of official functionaries – from the chief inspector of distilleries to the Government Printing Office and the master in lunacy – moved into the outbuildings, and after the immigrant women and the flotsam of Sydney society were moved on in 1886, the main barracks building was also taken over. With courts and offices, partitions and additions, Greenway’s Georgian purity was lost behind a jumble of outhouses.

  In 1883, James Barnet, a later government architect, proposed a public library on the site of Greenway’s barracks that would have rivalled Washington’s Capitol building in grandeur and scale. Barnet’s time was one of wealth, confidence and bravura that saw the construction of the massive Italianate-revival General Post Office and the sumptuous Colonial Secretary’s Building among a swag of structures that gloried in Sydney’s natural advantage: its fine building stone. To Barnet’s age, the convict past was best forgotten, the barracks nothing but a reminder of a discomforting history. Victorian-era bombast owed no debt to Georgian restraint in a city grown from a small town to close to 300 000 free inhabitants in the 60 or so years since the first inmate swung in his hammock at Hyde Park.15 It was a city in fashion, civic order and social distinction that Macquarie and Greenway would have struggled in many parts to recognise.

  In the course of the following century, the Hyde Park Barracks nearly toppled before the wrecker’s hammer
on several occasions. Sir John Sulman, the prominent English-born architect, was never one to value Australia’s architectural heritage, and at various times advocated the demolition of both the Hyde Park Barracks and St James’ Church. In 1909, the Royal Commission for the Improvement of Sydney and its Suburbs recommended the widening of Macquarie Street, which still served as a major thoroughfare down which trundled horse-drawn wagons laden with wool, hides and general merchandise bound for the warehouses and wharves of Circular Quay. As part of a series of improvements, new Houses of Parliament were proposed, with a new precinct of law courts intended for the street’s southern end at Queen’s Square. In an irony that would not have been lost on the architect of the old barracks, Greenway’s building was to be replaced by a bankruptcy court.16 Plans to widen Macquarie Street and extend King Street were again mooted in the 1930s. The Depression and then World War II helped stall such schemes, but the barracks were considered inevitable casualties of any future ‘improvements’.

  Some might have wished that the barracks go quietly as a victim of wilful neglect, one 1940 report finding ‘its condition … such that it cannot be preserved’.17 For others, the city needed to be more actively purged of its past. Referring to the barracks and the adjacent Sydney Mint (the surviving southern wing of the hospital), a 1947 correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald thought the ‘speedier they are demolished the better’. He was particularly offended by the barracks, ‘associated as it is with some of the worst traits of early military life in Sydney some of which foulness may still be physically felt in the aura attached to the building’.18

  But as much as planners, politicians and some sections of public opinion wanted this reminder of a societal deformity excised from the city’s physical body, a wider populace was warming to the historical and architectural worth of the barracks and the other survivors of the Macquarie era. The architect, painter and writer Hardy Wilson admired Greenway’s ‘scale of bigness, rarest excellence in his art, nowhere better expressed than in the Hyde Park barracks … which are barren except for Greenway’s rare feeling for scale’.19 And surrounded as she was by many of the manuscript treasures of the colonial era, the Mitchell librarian Ida Leeson hoped that the barracks might become a museum and their ‘simple dignity’ endure as a counter to the ‘blight of mid-Victorianism [that had] settled upon architecture as on the other arts’.20 That the barracks is now a ‘museum of itself ’21 would have well pleased Ida Leeson.