Marsden made sure that copies of his letter to Macquarie regarding the factory reached England. As Ellis put it in his most acerbic prose, ‘the good man’s tears fell copiously upon the parchment as he wrote this touching missive from which, however, he tactfully omitted any reference to the ladies whom he had immured in the horrible den with logs tied to their legs’.8
In light of his reputation for dispensing severe punishments, Marsden’s mendacity and sanctimoniousness when writing to Macquarie are spectacular:
As their minister, I must account, ere long, at the bar of Divine Justice, for my duty to these objects of vice and woe. I see how they live and how they die! and often feel inexpressible anguish of spirit … and follow them to the grave with awful forebodings, lest I should be found at last to have neglected any part of my public duty as their minister and their magistrate, and by so doing contributed to their eternal ruin! … no relief will ever be found … so long as the male and female convicts are … at liberty to spend their nights in scenes of prostitution, robberies and other vices …9
Four years later, and despite sympathising with Marsden in his dealings with Macquarie, Commissioner Bigge perceived a grave inconsistency in the parson’s agitation, and the obvious deficiencies in his succour of the women:
The gaol and factory … had originally been constructed under his directions, and he must at an early period have been convinced of the inadequacy of such buildings, for the purposes either of penal discipline or of moral restraint: in both these points of view, the plan was as objectionable as the execution was defective.
While not laying the shortcomings of the building directly at Marsden’s feet, Bigge still thought ‘it is somewhat surprising, that from the period of his appointment to the magistracy … he had not addressed some representation to Governor Macquarrie [sic], of the same evils that he then deplored, the existence of which … must have been as much within his observation …’10
Macquarie’s response to Marsden’s outpourings was firm, if breathtaking in its disingenuousness. The governor informed the churchman that he had ‘written home three years ago to his Majesty’s Ministers, soliciting their permission to have buildings of this description erected immediately’ but had not ‘been yet honoured with an answer’. In the meantime, what was a governor to do? He could not possibly ‘take upon myself so serious a responsibility as to have [such buildings] erected, and thereby incurring so great an expense to the Crown, without first obtaining the permission of His Majesty’s Ministers’. Macquarie espoused sympathy with Marsden ‘over the disorders and immoralities consequent on the want of proper quarters for the male and female convicts’, but without Whitehall’s blessing he was powerless to act.11 For the time being, the governor’s only remedy had a decidedly modern political ring to it – a law-and-order crackdown with more police on the beat.
Some time in September or early October 1816, more than a year after Macquarie’s exchange with Samuel Marsden, Greenway inspected the Parramatta Gaol and Female Factory on instructions from the governor. Though brief, Greenway’s report painted a pitiful scene. A fire had damaged the building a few years before, but proper repairs had not been made, and he now found the cells of the gaol in a ‘dangerous State, and [advised they] should be immediately taken down and rebuilt’. The men were sleeping on wet ground with no flooring, ‘to the great Injury of their health’. Aside from the question of humanity, the inmates of the gaol were likely to be ‘disabled for Work and only fit for the Hospital’. But not only was the physical health of the men at risk through rising damp, there were also dangers from on high: ‘The Men too have access to the Women above … which should be done away with as early as possible by removing the Factory, as the present state of it … has a very bad moral Tendency’.12
Such findings briefly ruffled the cassock of Parramatta’s chaplain. Later, before the commission, Greenway claimed that Marsden ‘did not seem to be pleased with those [observations] that I made’.13 Greenway also noted that he had spoken to Marsden on the state of the building ‘sometime in 1815’. Given the architect’s tactless nature, he might not have been as ready as Commissioner Bigge to divorce the building’s deficiencies from the name of the reverend gentleman. And for his part, Marsden would hardly have cared for a convict venturing an opinion to a magistrate and the senior cleric in colony. One so intractable as Marsden would have given the governor’s architect short shrift.
Anyway, why should Marsden care, with his cause being aided to potent effect in England? Large slices of Marsden’s missive to Macquarie regarding the factory would eventually be quoted in parliament and in Henry Grey Bennet’s highly coloured Letter to Viscount Sidmouth. In each forum, Bennet reinforced the undeniable case that it ‘would … have been better to have built a house for the reception of these poor wretches … than the construction of … all the fopperies and follies which have recently been erected’.14
And so, yet another year dawdled by. The new Parramatta Female Factory seemed to be stuck in administrative limbo, with Macquarie’s tardiness as puzzling as Marsden’s self-serving conduct and hypocrisy were spectacular. The building was included on the governor’s New Year’s Day list of 1817, yet it was not until the following December that he again raised the need of a female factory in a despatch to London. It seems that Macquarie was none too subtly covering himself against expected criticism.
Writing to Bathurst, the governor restated much of the argument put to Liverpool five years before: the lack of accommodation for women; their difficulties finding suitable employment; and their vulnerability to ‘bad connections which lead to vicious and profligate conduct’. Macquarie now envisaged:
a large factory … within a high inclosure [sic], for the employment and residence of the female convicts, and within a large space of ground for recreation, so as to keep them always within it, and prevent them having any intercourse with the people of the town, until such time as they should either be married, or assigned as domestic servants to married persons.15
The governor then left himself wide open to censure. This was the time when work on the stables and Fort Macquarie was about to commence, and the obelisk and fountain were under construction – hardly necessities all. Yet on the basis of stretched resources, Macquarie justified his lack of action on the female factory: ‘The variety of other public buildings required in the colony, and the inadequacy of the colonial funds … have hitherto precluded the possibility of my realizing my wishes to have a factory and dwelling-house on a large scale erected at Parramatta’. Macquarie ended by assuring Bathurst that a start would soon be made, and that he would ‘defray the entire expense from the colonial funds’. He also reminded his lordship that he had suggested in one of his despatches ‘some years ago, the expediency of erecting a factory and dwelling-house for the female convicts at Parramatta’.
Come the Commission of Inquiry, and Bigge seized upon the inconsistencies in Macquarie’s dissembling over the factory. Despite the prolixity of his contorted prose, the commissioner’s extreme displeasure grins through his Report … into the State of the Colony:
Having observed, in Governor Macquarrie’s [sic] answer to Mr. Marsden, that he justified the delay that occurred … I felt it to be my duty to call to the recollection of Governor Macquarrie, that he had undertaken several buildings of much less urgent necessity than the factory at Paramatta [sic], without waiting for any such indispensible authority; and I now find, that the construction of it was announced by him to your Lordship in the year 1817 … without making any specific allusion to the evils which the want of it had so long occasioned.16
To Commissioner Bigge, Macquarie’s explanation would simply be a ‘feeble and unsafe justification of himself ’.
In January 1818, Macquarie finally directed Greenway: ‘To make a Ground Plan and Elevation of a Factory & Barrack sufficient to lodge 300 Female Convicts, on an Area of Ground of 4 Acres, enclosed by a Stone Wall 9 feet High’.17 The ‘area of ground’ was by the river
and opposite the governor’s domain on a grant of land originally made to Governor Bligh. On 10 March 1818 Macquarie recorded in his diary that: ‘I yesterday pointed out to Mr. Greenway the intended Scite [sic] for the new Govt. Factory & Barrack about to be erected at Parramatta’.18
While Macquarie had chosen to feign fiscal timidity until as late as 1818, it seems that his ecclesiastical adversary had not been entirely idle on the matter of the factory. According to Ellis, Marsden ‘had the full encouragement of Mr [James] Smith, his henchman and contractor, who never before had had the chance to feel so fat a plum fall into his lap’.19 Marsden had instructed Smith to draw up a plan, which was then begrudgingly submitted to the governor for approval. The builder claimed to be ‘under treaty for the work under Mr Marsden, for the sum of £14,000’. But in a gesture clearly designed to remind the chaplain who was in control, Macquarie declined the overtures of Marsden and his ‘henchman’, and ‘put an end to such hopes’ by passing Smith’s drawing to Greenway.20 The architect then produced his own design for the factory and ‘took the width of the rooms, as proposed in [Smith’s] Plan’.21
According to Greenway, the experience of the ‘ill-advised contract’ for St Matthew’s, and the debacle with Kitchen that followed, ‘convinced [Macquarie] of the necessity of following my advice’. The architect produced drawings, specifications and a bill of quantities, and the project was advertised for open tender – a routine procedure for any substantial building project, one would have thought. But unnamed persons (obviously Marsden and Smith) ‘wished to have had management of this building, without my interference’. Greenway muttered darkly that the ‘first object of certain parties was to alarm any one from attempting to contract from my bill of quantities, by stating that there was double the quantity as stated by me in the building; and if they did contract for it they would be ruined’.22 A further unnamed person (probably one of the eventual successful tenderers) was engaged by Greenway to produce an estimate based on his bill. Unsurprisingly, the estimate came in at a very lean £4500, less than a third of Smith’s ‘treaty’ price.
Shortly before the tenders closed, Smith confronted Greenway and insisted that his bill was wrong. The architect’s hackles rose. The builder could see that his stubborn adversary would not be talked round; perhaps a few pounds might help? Perhaps £500 – a staggeringly large sum for the time – would help Mr Greenway see that a tender price of £12 000 was a more accurate reflection of the true value of the work.23 Greenway remained unmoved, leaving Smith to turn on his heels and storm away, apparently ‘crimson in the face’. But as Ellis accurately observed:
Dishonest, on occasion, Mr Greenway might be in his own simple and stubborn way, but he was never crude. So coarse a mode of bribery – whatever wretches might say about odd fivepound notes slipped to him in connection with … the dockyard wall – seems to have had no appeal for him.24
Greenway continued the tale:
The day appointed, the estimates were opened at government house by the Governor. The estimate of the person who calculated from my bill amounted to £4800; the other three estimates were from about ten to twelve thousand pounds. The governor treated the tenderers in a manner they deserved …25
Macquarie was left with one bid, that of the pair Ellis describes as the ‘single lily-white partnership of Messrs [William] Watkins and [Isaac] Payten’. A price of £4788 was duly struck and a contract signed on 13 April 1818. The work was to be completed within 18 months. But it seems the disgruntled unsuccessful tenderers did not take their defeat with grace, and they continued to frustrate progress before a sod was turned on the Parramatta site. This time they targeted the contractors’ guarantor.
Watkins and Payten had persuaded wealthy emancipist merchant and landholder Samuel Terry to be their guarantor. The irony contained in Terry’s surety would have pleased the man who, in less than two decades, had become one of the wealthiest individuals in the colony, and was known as the ‘Botany Bay Rothschild’. As a newly arrived convict in 1801, Terry had been assigned to the stonemason’s gang building the first female factory at Parramatta, where, under Marsden’s direction, ‘he was both flogged for neglect of duty and rewarded for industry’.26
The failed bidders would have their revenge and supposedly got at Terry, convincing him that the factory contractors were headed for certain ruin: ‘those who would be foolish enough to become security for them would have to finish it for them or forfeit their bond’.27 Terry withdrew his guarantee, but Macquarie, now desperate to press on, accepted Watkins and Payten’s own surety. On the morning of 9 July, Macquarie, Greenway and the builders met on site for the laying of the foundation stone. As per the usual custom, the workers were given ‘Four Gallons of spirits to drink Success to the Building’.28
According to Greenway, the ‘contractors proceeded with the building rapidly, notwithstanding every difficulty being thrown in their way by interested persons’.29 Again, read James Smith as among those ‘interested persons’. By the latter half of 1819, Smith was also in bitter dispute with Greenway over the completion of St Luke’s at Liverpool.
Inevitably, actual progress on the female factory was slower than the architect made out. Disputes dogged the project, the first matter at issue being the acceptable stretch of masonry that could be laid in a day. It seems a go-slow had overtaken the labour on the site, and Watkins and Payten soon became worried. Greenway claimed his standard ‘to be 16 feet of Ashlar such as they are working’ and remarked that ‘it could be done with Ease before One o’clock by any man who had worked 12 months at the business’.30 Such a rate was adopted – begrudgingly or otherwise – and the work proceeded, fuelled by an incentive of an extra threepence a foot for each man who exceeded the target.
But certain malcontents fomented dissent, with a rumour spread by a man named Jackson that Watkins and Payten would soon ‘give them all up’ in retaliation for the go-slow. The men immediately complained to Hannibal Macarthur (Marsden’s associate as the second magistrate at Parramatta) that the contractors were neglecting to pay their wages. Hannibal was John Macarthur’s nephew, himself a significant landowner and a rising exclusivist – hardly one to sympathise with the acting civil architect. Greenway reacted by appealing to Mr Justice Barron Field (Jeffrey Hart Bent’s replacement as judge of the Supreme Court), who examined the architect under oath and determined that his labour demands were within bounds. But Macarthur, it seems, ‘felt himself disturbed’ and called an expert witness, a certain Mr Elder, one he claimed as the ‘best Mason in the Colony’. Greenway was not amused, claiming that Elder ‘with unblushing front … stated upon Oath that Seven feet was enough for a Government Man to do [in] a Day’. The contractors ‘felt themselves greatly disturbed … & they [exclaimed] rather violently upon it’.
Unlike the contractors, Greenway maintained his composure, and through Judge Field pointedly asked Elder what he expected as a minimum wage per day for a mason. The witness blithely declared: ‘Seven Shillings’. Greenway had caught him out with simple arithmetic! At threepence per foot, for that price it was reasonable to expect 28 feet as a day’s run – nearly double the minimum of standard of 16, and four times Elder’s pathetic seven feet.31 ‘A good Mason’, the architect contended with obvious contempt for the witness, ‘could work from 30 to 40 feet p. Day’.
Field was again prepared to side with Greenway, but ‘Mr Macarthur seemed to want further Evidence’. A practical trial was ordered. The proceedings were delayed ‘for the purpose of finding some Government Men, one who [had] never cut a Stone in his life [and] the other one who had … never worked a Stone before he came into this Country’. If Greenway’s testimony is a true reflection of events, he must have thought he was being well and truly stitched up. There were obviously forces at play outside the court-room, the rotund shadow of Macarthur’s fellow magistrate, and that of his builder friend, falling across proceedings.
But then Macarthur changed his mind and instead of the two ‘government men’, Richar
d Rouse, builder of the extensions to Government House at Parramatta, was sent for. Macarthur ‘seemed determined to obtain Evidence to do away [with] that which ought have been conclusive’, and a bitter Greenway called the whole thing a ‘vile conspiracy’. To his relief, Greenway found that Rouse supported his case, stating that ‘till 3 o’clock’ 14 feet should be worked, and that 16 feet could be worked with ease’, with the architect acting as the ‘proper judge of what was sufficient’. This was clearly not the answer Macarthur was expecting, as he then pressed on with ‘every Means … to bring the Contractors in Debt’.
The ‘vile conspiracy’ bubbled along, a mere whiff of its acrid vapours highly offensive to the architect’s sensibilities. Macarthur treated Greenway with ‘much disrespect’, and prevented him from asking further questions of Elder to ‘show to the Court what he was’. For his part, Greenway considered it ‘impolitic on the part of the Magistrate … to place me in so disagreeable a State’. He then escaped the court ‘with that Indignation [that] any Man possessing common feeling would have done’.32
Greenway’s account of the courtroom drama is contained in his ‘Report on Convict Labour’ (appended to Commissioner Bigge’s findings), and also in one of his rambling Australian letters.33 Neither states how long progress on the factory was riven by disruptions, but what is apparent is that the dispute was still far from settled. The men on the job soon got wind of the court proceedings, and the atmosphere on site turned from sour to rancid. Payten withheld wages on the difference between 14 and 16 feet per day, but the men by this time were emboldened; they knew who their champion was.
On one of his visits to the factory site, Greenway was insulted by a mason named Kelly, who declared ‘that he would not work for less than 25/– p. Week’, otherwise he would ‘go to Macarthur to support him’. All this from a man drawing rations from the government, and to Greenway a ‘woful [sic] proof of the effects of the Countenance given when such a Man shall strike for the advance of Wages’. He felt isolated and bereft of support, his authority totally undermined: ‘me who ought to have the full Command of such Men and the vigorous support of the Magistrates’.34 Greenway predicted trouble, where ‘we shall have … every Government Man insisting on doing Seven feet of Ashlar only’.
A Forger's Progress Page 27