These Few Lines

by Graham Seal

  Between August and December 1829, 18 immigrant ships anchored off Fremantle. This was the start of an initial flurry of settlement. Word of a new, free colony in sunny Australia had an appealing resonance to the solid upper working classes and lower middle classes of Britain, keen to better themselves. Sturdy farmers, artisans and God-fearing Wesleyans were among the first settlers. Usually well-resourced with funds, skills and family, these pioneers displayed the determined focus of successful settlers in Australia and elsewhere in the New World. For the most part they felt they had burnt their bridges to wherever they had come from and so must make their new lives a success or suffer the dreaded nineteenth century disgrace of penury. They were inclined not to be dissuaded from their aspirations by climate, landscape, red tape or natives. As a catch-phrase of the time went, they were ‘sterling stock’. These hardy settlers were not of the class represented by Henry Jubb and those others who benefited from England’s game laws. Such people had no need to emigrate. Nor were many of them of the same class as William Sykes; they were often too poor to leave.

  Those who did come, quickly pushed inland, establishing viable settlements at Fremantle, Perth, Bunbury on the coast south of Perth and a few inland spots, including Newcastle (Toodyay). In the long years of his transportation at the Swan River William Sykes would come to know these places well.

  There were the inevitable disasters, including the colonists tempted to the Swan by the ambitious immigration and settlement schemes of Thomas Peel, in which settlers were attracted by the promise of land grants. Peel negotiated an enormous grant of one million acres with the British government and various private backers, planning to bring 10 000 emigrants to the colony. Some of his backers got cold feet and, ultimately, only 400 immigrants arrived in 1830, too late to take up grants as the deadline for their arrival had passed. Four hundred were simply forsaken along the coast, many subsequently dying from dysentery, scurvy and the other consequences of heat, rain and hardship.3 Around the same time another emigrant ship was wrecked nearby, the crew, passengers and even his own wife and children abandoned by the captain. A few were saved by the bravery of a navy officer.

  Despite these setbacks, the colony pushed ahead, expanding ever further into the lands that had once been those of the indigenous inhabitants alone. At first, relations with the Aborigines were reasonably cordial, but within a year there was misunderstanding, conflict and violence. The local bands resisted, especially those led by Midgegooro and Yagan, which led to an escalating conflict of raids, retribution, ambush and summary execution, usually performed in a particularly savage manner.

  These conflicts culminated in the fateful events of 28 October 1834, in which Stirling led a party of 24 mounted civilians and troops against 80 Murray River people. At least 15 Aboriginal men, women and children were shot dead in what is now called the Pinjarra Massacre. This was followed by systematic harassment of local groups, their rapid dispersal to the edges of settlement and their concentration into easily managed food depots or camps, often proclaimed as Aboriginal reserves.

  The establishment of such a depot in 1833 had prompted one early settler, sympathetic to the indigenes, the enigmatic Robert Lyon, to caustically twist this name to its other meaning of a game reserve: ‘What does the local Government mean? Does it intend to keep the natives as a game reserve to be fed and shot at leisure?’4 Even in this far-flung edge of empire the game laws and the social conflicts they engendered, produced strong reverberations of home, which were amplified by the colony’s foundation rationale of providing cheap land and access to its resources – at the expense of those who were already there.

  But Lyon was a solitary voice among the settlers. The massacre at Pinjarra, one of many such that took place around the continent, effectively ended Aboriginal resistance to European occupation and the settlement of the Swan River was able to proceed in relative peace, if uncertain prosperity.

  After some initial progress, the Swan River Colony faltered, a victim in many ways of its own success. Those who did brave the long sea voyage and the perils of the bush often advanced rapidly, due to the relative cheapness of the land and the shortage of labour that ensured high wages. Despite this, fewer and fewer people were attracted to the Swan River. One reason for this was the often negative presentation of the colony in the British press, which showed the colony as a sink of drunkenness and iniquity, mosquitoes, flies, heat and disease. This image dogged the Swan River from its very beginnings. A cartoon published in Britain during 1830 depicted the lot of those landed on the beaches at Fremantle awaiting scarce and expensive passage upriver to Perth. It showed a derelict shanty with a pub sign above reading, ‘The Swan Tavern’, poverty-stricken and drunken settler families and the hulk of an emigrant ship wrecked on the sands.5 There are accounts of entire families camping here for months, along with their possessions, including china, cutlery and pianos. Some took one look at the barren, uninviting place and promptly sailed elsewhere.6

  The Swan was a free settlement, but it was not an easy or comfortable place to make a new life. By the 1840s there were more people leaving than arriving. In 1845 not a single immigrant stepped ashore at Fremantle. The settlement was in a state of economic crisis that threw its future viability into grave doubt.

  Swan River settlers had long debated the possibility of convicts being transported from England. To survive and to develop further, the struggling colony needed infrastructure: roads, bridges, buildings. To get these things they needed something of which they had very little: labour.7 They petitioned the British government for the introduction of transportation to the Swan. They wanted convicts whose passage and costs were paid for by the British government and who would work hard for nothing. They did not want hardened criminals and they did not want female convicts. Their efforts were successful and, on 1 May 1849, the Swan River was classified a penal colony by the British government. The first 75 convicts, accompanied by 50 pensioner guards, their families and a number of bureaucrats under the command of a Comptroller-General of Convicts, arrived on board the Scindian on 1 June 1850.8 Twenty-one years to the day after the colony had begun with such high hopes and ideals of free enterprise, it now succumbed to the provision of government-funded criminals.

  Reactions to this event were mixed. While most recognised the need for something drastic to be done, many were concerned at the introduction of convicted criminals into their small community. The value or otherwise of transportation to the colony remained a contentious issue for the full 18 years of the system’s operation. A satirical song of the time, sung to the tune of ‘The Campbells are Coming’, sums up the mixture of amusement and concern with which the first convicts were greeted:

  The Convicts are coming, oho!, oho!

  What a curse to the Swan! What a terrible blow!

  No – devil a bit – don’t fear, my old bricks,

  How much we may learn, if they’ll teach us their tricks.

  The Convicts are coming, oh dear, oh dear!

  Don’t button your pockets – there’s nothing to fear;

  For surely no exile would venture to thieve,

  When away from the prison, on a Ticket of Leave …

  The Convicts are coming, huzza, huzza!

  If you want to pick locks, they will show us the way.

  Do we think to cut throats or to blow out men’s brains,

  They’ll show us the mode, if we’ll only take pains.

  The satire ended with a swipe at Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies:

  The Convicts are coming, huzza, huzza!

  Three cheers for the Convicts, and three for Earl Grey!

  Three cheers for the Swanites and nine for each man,

  Who devised and perfected this glorious plan.

  Seventeen years later, when William Sykes and his companions arrived aboard the second-last convict ship ever to land in Western Australia, there was no cheering. In fact, there was not much interest at all. By then the convicts had become a normal a
nd accepted aspect of colonial life. The massive Fremantle Prison had been built to house them, along with a number of other public buildings, roads and public works to benefit the colony.

  The transports were taken to Fremantle Prison, its great limestone walls by then already greying into the foreboding fortress it remains today. Once inside they were washed, barbered and issued with their uniforms, including the parti-coloured workgang uniforms that ensured that the convicts stood out among the colonial population whenever they were labouring outside the prison walls. Convicts’ rations were basic but adequate and included bread, meat, potatoes, salt and pepper, tea, sugar, milk and rice or oatmeal on Mondays and Fridays. They were also given regular issues of soap and soda for the cleansing of their clothes and bodies.

  The transformation of the free Swan River into a penal colony necessitated the building of substantial institutions of incarceration, the ‘Convict Establishment’, as it was officially known. Almost as soon as they arrived, the second cargo of convicts had been sent to work on the early preparations for the building in October 1850. Over the next few years, work on the prison proceeded in fits and starts as masons, carpenters and other tradesmen, whether free or bound, were often scarce. The prison’s two wings and central chapel section were not completed until 1859, although one wing was occupied in 1855. This building, capable of housing a thousand inmates, was a self-contained miniature metropolis, with its own workshops, offices, stores, halls and chapel. There were 240 cells but only eight smelly toilets and legions of cockroaches. The Establishment was also equipped with the grim necessities of convict discipline, solitary confinement, a good supply of cat-o-nine-tails for flogging and, the ultimate punishment, a gallows.

  The prison soon acquired a grim reputation, some of which is reflected in its folklore. Numbers six and sixteen were shunned: a 6 was said to represent the hangman’s noose and 16 the noose and gallows pole. Unlucky 13 features in the 13 stone steps that lead from the gallows pit and there are 13 spaces between the beams on the roof of the gallows. The drop from the trapdoor to the floor of the gallows pit is exactly 13 feet.9 With such macabre architectural mathematics it is not surprising that the aura of despair still clings to the prison, even since its decommissioning in 1991 and subsequent development as a heritage and dark tourism site.

  As usual with public works, the budget more than doubled by the time the prison and a number of necessary subsidiary works, such as a jetty and barracks, was completed. Even so, Fremantle and its citizens did very well out of this substantial project, so much so that Fremantle developed at a more rapid rate than Perth. The seat of power in the colony languished up the river, far away from the comings and goings of commerce and crime that established Fremantle as a solid city in its own right.

  Still, the wisdom of the transportation program was proven as the colony’s finances gradually improved. By the mid-1860s it was possible for the Swan River to think itself a success once more. Buttressed by the reassuring mass of Fremantle Prison, the colony had become a little more relaxed about its criminal class. But not too relaxed.

  When the arrangements for transportation to the Swan had been agreed between the colony and the British government it was understood by the colonists that those convicted of the more heinous crimes would not be sent to the fledgling free community. At first, this was the case. But as the years went on, the character of convicts sent declined markedly,10 as the make-up of the weight of woe aboard the Norwood shows. It was not only those whose crimes were of violence and brutality who were feared, but also those who conspired against the state. Political prisoners were as great a source of concern to the colonists as were common criminals.

  Even though the Norwood brought the next-to-last convicts – and some of those who came last on the next convict ship had a part to play in this story – discipline was rigidly maintained and zealously applied. This was notably so under the command of Governor Hampton, a man with experience of the notorious depths of the Van Diemen’s Land penal system. Gangs of chained convicts were a common sight in Fremantle, Perth and outlying regions such as the developing area of Bunbury, around 100 miles south of Perth, now safely pacified of ‘savages’. It was here that William Sykes and John Teale were sent in late August 1867.

  Aboard the Wild Wave and under the command of a single warder, Sykes, Teale and 16 other convicts sailed for Bunbury and the Vasse River area. As well as the human cargo, the ship carried the usual range of supplies and foodstuffs that formed the backbone of colonial trade – sugar, tea and brandy, together with sundry other items in demand. Like Fremantle, the township of Bunbury had done well from the arrival of the convicts. It had a hiring station for renting out convict labour to the settlers who could afford it and it had a thriving mercantile export business in timbers, including jarrah and sandalwood. And it was a favourite sailortown for American whalers who frequented the settlement so often and expansively that American dollars were as welcome as local currency in the public houses and other businesses. From this outpost of administration, trade and small-scale iniquity the newly-arrived William Sykes and John Teale were sent to work with almost 100 other numbered men building the road from Perth to Albany, the major settlement in the south.

  The four poachers were beginning now to be separated from each other. Henry Bone and John Bentcliffe, still lodging together, sailed north to Champion Bay. They would be set to work in the minerals industry being developed there under very primitive conditions. Both were due for their tickets of leave in only seven years. Bone seems to have remained in this part of the colony until his death at Geraldton in 1895, working on the roads and in the mines.11 Bentcliffe received a conditional release in 1885 and worked at Champion Bay in the usual broad range of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs, including as servant, miner, shepherd and, as William Sykes would also become, a well-sinker. Bentcliffe’s ultimate fate is unknown. It is possible, though perhaps unlikely, that he returned to England after the expiry of his sentence.

  Far to the south William Sykes and John Teale were blistering their hands with the road-building party in the dense forests along the Blackwood River section. Even though convicts usually preferred road gangs, with their minimum of discipline, this work and the conditions under which it had to be done were not to the liking of William or his mate. After a few months they absconded to the developing settlement of Bunbury. There was nowhere else to go in the alien vastness of this place and the two were soon caught. Charged with mutinous and insubordinate conduct on 26 November, they were returned for two further months of gang labour and had their tobacco ration stopped for six months, a moderate sentence.

  Similar acts often brought imprisonment on starvation rations and a flogging with the lash.

  The two poachers were separated after their return from Bunbury. Teale’s record indicates a number of minor and more brutal acts of violence, followed by a serious accident while a member of a survey party. The accident may have left him with a lasting disability as his subsequent record includes remissions for good behaviour and ‘clemency’.12 As did Bone and Bentcliffe, he would also end up in Geraldton, getting by as a labourer, a general servant and a shepherd.13

  William worked satisfactorily, it seems, for the rest of that year, mainly on the Harvey Road. But he did not take the time to write to Myra, even though he was allowed to send one letter every three months. Receiving no word from William, Myra was deeply troubled, as her first letter to him in the colony shows. When Myra had sent her box of ‘articals’ to her husband, she had ended her accompanying letter with a plea:

  Be sure to write and let me know if you have recd the box for I shall not be easy in my mind until I hear from you again …

  But she did not hear from William for a very long time. And even then it was only through his family that she had any contact with her transported husband at all.

  William arrived at the Swan River in mid-July of 1867, but Myra had no word from him for a year and three months. On 20 September 1868, My
ra wrote from Masborough in answer to a letter she had at last received from William dated 5 July that year. Although some parts of this letter are missing, Myra was clearly at her wits’ end with worry and lack of information:

  Dear Husband I was glad to heir that you were well and in good [probably ‘health’; part of page torn away]

  I thought that soemthing had happened to you because their was no letters for me

  She is not happy that William has sent her letter care of his family, a relationship that will come under increasing strain as the years go by:

  and I was much further put about when I received your letter when it was a week amongst them before I got it

  Despite writing a diary of the voyage, William did not think or bother to send it back home for Myra and the children to read. Not that its brevity would have been very informative, but it would have been the thought that counted:

  Dear husband when you write again send me word what sort of a pashege you had when you were going out and send word whither you got that box I sent you when you were leving this country for you never said in your letter whither you got it or not …

  Myra had been wondering and worrying about the box of ‘articals’ for over a year. Had the lovingly selected, expensive and carefully packed box reached him? Had he found it useful? What sort of a voyage did he have? The questions were many. And not only from her, but from the children and from their friends and acquaintances as well.

  Myra goes on to give William the news from home:

  all send their kind love to you and Edward Huttley and his wife sends their kind love also and your daughter Ann is in place and doing well and Alfread is working in the [indecipehrable] mill and he gets 10 pence per day