by Graham Seal
The planters came around us—there might be twenty score or more.
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They yoked us in a plough, brave boys, to plough Van Diemen’s Land.
Street ballad
AS SOON AS the news about founding a penal colony at Botany Bay broke in 1787, the British press went into action. Articles, pamphlets and street ballads appeared almost overnight. ‘Botany Bay: A New Song’ was a tongue-in-cheek roll call of the English underworld, the source of most of our first settlers. There were ‘night-walking strumpets’, ‘lecherous whoremasters’, ‘proud dressy fops’ and ‘monopolisers who add to their store/By cruel oppression and squeezing the poor’. The second-last verse of this street ballad expressed the popular view of the time:
The hulks and the jails have some thousands in store,
But out of the jails are ten thousand times more,
Who live by fraud, cheating, vile tricks and foul play,
They should all be sent over to Botany Bay.
This song also raised the possibility that the transports and their keepers might ‘become a new people at Botany Bay’. Of course it did, though there were many unhappy moments along the path to nationhood, especially in the convict days. But mostly, convictism was about the personal trials, tragedies and triumphs of the 160,000 or so men and women transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868.
Leaden hearts
Transportation to the far ends of the earth, even for a relatively short term of seven years, meant the end of lives and loves for many convicts. Even before the settlement of Port Jackson, a custom grew in which convicts departing to penal colonies had coins filed smooth and an affectionate message engraved on both sides. These often handmade tokens—or ‘leaden hearts’—were left with wives, families or lovers in the hope that they would not forget, even if the sentence were for life. Brief though these messages had to be, they hint at many poignant stories from the Australian experience of transportation.
Seventeen-year-old Charles Wilkinson stole a handkerchief and was transported for life in 1824. The crude carvings on his token read:
Your lover lives for you
CL
Only.
Til death
The reverse of his token told the story in a few terse words:
C Wilkinson
Lag[ged] for Life
Aged 17
1824
‘C.L.’ probably never saw Charles again. Wilkinson reoffended in Australia and did not receive a free pardon for twenty years. Like most convicts he probably remained here, unable to afford a passage home and after such a long absence perhaps not seeing much reason to return.
A Michael Williams (alias Flinn) was sentenced to death for stealing tea from the wharves in London. His token read:
M Flinn
Aged 25
Cast for death
September 16
1825
On the back:
A token of true love
when this you se[e]
remember me
Fortunately, his sentence was commuted to transportation for life.
Sometimes tokens expressed a degree of remorse and moralising. Joseph Kelf, aged twenty, was ‘cast for death’ after burgling a Norfolk home in 1833. His sentence commuted, he had a token made with the homily:
Honesty is the best policy
Many of these keepsakes were in verse, some elaborately so. John Waldon was given a fourteen-year stretch in 1832. His token reads:
No Pen can Write
No Tongue can Tell
The Aching Heart
That Bids Farewell.
Thomas Alsop, a Staffordshire sheep stealer, was 21 when transported for life in 1833. He could not write but had two fine tokens made, one for his ‘dear mother’:
The rose soon dupes and dies
The brier fades away
But my fond heart for you I love
Shall never fade away.
Convicted of murder in 1832, William Kennedy was lucky to have his sentence cut to a lifetime of labour in the colonies. He had the engraver inscribe his coin with a defiant verse:
When this you see
Remember me
And bear me in your mind.
Let all the world
Say what they will
Speak of me as you find.
Another ‘When this you see think on me’ token was made for Thomas Burbury of Coventry, who was convicted of rioting and machine breaking in 1832. Machine breakers, or ‘Luddites’, destroyed factories and mechanical weaving devices in the accurate belief that these devices would rob them of their employment as skilled handloom weavers working from their cottages. Sentences for these acts were severe and Burbury was sentenced to hang. But the local community, not considering such actions to be crimes, exerted enough pressure to have his sentence commuted to transportation for life.
He landed in Tasmania in 1832. Only a few months later, his wife and child also arrived, having been provided with a passage through public donations. Reunited with his family, Burbury began to buy land in his wife’s name and became a valued assigned servant, helping to hunt down bushrangers. By 1837, he had his ticket of leave and a full pardon two years later. He went on to become a local council employee and a member of Oatlands local council, and died a respected local pioneer, as did many transported convicts.
The Ring
Almost as old a settlement as Port Jackson, Norfolk Island became known as one of the worse convict hellholes. A penal station was established on the island only a few months after the arrival of the First Fleet but was abandoned in 1814, and in 1825 a second penal colony was founded. There was a need for somewhere to put ‘the worst description of convicts’; Norfolk was intended to be a place of no hope, where hard cases would be imprisoned and worked in irons until they died.
The island rapidly gained a reputation for horrifying brutality and sadistic oppression by a succession of military commanders and their squads of willing brutalisers. There was an unsuccessful revolt or mutiny in 1834 and when the Vicar General of Sydney, the Very Reverend William Ullathorne, arrived to tell the offenders who would live and who would die, he reported, ‘As I mentioned the names of those men who were to die, they one after another, as their names were pronounced, dropped on their knees and thanked God that they were to be delivered from that horrible place, whilst the others remained standing mute, weeping. It was the most horrible scene I have ever witnessed.’
Despite these disturbing images, historical research suggests that while Norfolk Island was not a pleasant place to be, the more extreme images of brutality and degradation may be based on a selection of unusually brutal incidents and the amplifying effect of folk tradition. However, there are persistent tales of the terrors experienced on the island between 1825 and the penal station’s final closure in 1856, largely in response to a number of damning reports.
An especially intriguing story involves an alleged secret society known as ‘the Ring’. In Marcus Clarke’s famous novel For the Term of His Natural Life, we first hear of the Ring when Rufus Dawes is sent to Norfolk Island and becomes its leader. In another Ring story, three convicts agree to drawing lots to decide which one will kill another, leaving the third as a witness against the murderer, ensuring that he will be hanged. This is based on a claim made in a British Select Committee of Parliament in 1838 by Colonel George Arthur: ‘… Two or three men murdered their fellow-prisoners, with the certainty of being detected and executed, apparently without malice and with very little excitement, stating that they knew that they should be hanged, but it was better than being where they were.’
In the writings of Clarke and Price Warung (William Astley), this relatively rare horror is transformed into a Ring custom. In For the Term of His Natural Life, Clarke has one of his characters note in his diary:
May 16th.—A sub-overseer, a man named Hankey, has been talking to me. He says that there are some forty of the oldest
and worst prisoners who form what he calls the ‘Ring’, and that the members of this ‘Ring’ are bound by oath to support each other, and to avenge the punishment of any of their number. In proof of his assertions he instanced two cases of English prisoners who had refused to join in some crime, and had informed the Commandant of the proceedings of the Ring. They were found in the morning strangled in their hammocks. An inquiry was held, but not a man out of the ninety in the ward would speak a word. I dread the task that is before me. How can I attempt to preach piety and morality to these men? How can I attempt even to save the less villainous?
In Warung’s later short stories, said to be based on interviews with ex-convicts, we also read about an elaborately structured clandestine order existing within the prison system and effectively running it. Led by the One, the Ring is said to have been a hierarchy of 25 members. The lowest order consisted of nine members and was known as the Nine; the next were the seven members of the Seven; then the Fives and Threes. Only the Threes knew the identity of the One. Only the worst of the worst were invited to join at the bottom level and could work themselves up to the higher orders by even more evildoing. The Ring’s rationale was complete denial of all penal authority. Any member who had any dealings with the gaolers was to be killed, and only then could a new recruit fill the gap. While the members of each order were known to each other, those of the other orders did not know them. Nor did anyone outside the Ring, convict or gaoler, know the identity of its initiates. But no one was in any doubt of its existence.
When the Ring decided to meet, word went through the prison that no non-member, including guards, should enter the prison yard. The One entered the yard first and faced a corner of the wall. He was followed by the Threes, Fives, Sevens and Nines, each arrayed in a semi-circle behind him. All were masked. Satanic prayers were intoned:
Is God an officer of the establishment?
And the response came solemnly clear, thrice repeated:
No, God is not an officer of the establishment.
He passed to the next question:
Is the Devil an officer of the establishment?
And received the answer—thrice:
Yes, the Devil is an officer of the establishment.
He continued:
Then do we obey God?
With clear-cut resonance came the negative—
No, we do not obey God!
He propounded the problem framed by souls that are not necessarily corrupt:
Then whom do we obey?
And, thrice over, he received for reply the damning perjury which yet was so true an answer:
The Devil—we obey our Lord the Devil!
And the dreaded Convict Oath was taken. It had eight verses according to Warung:
Hand to hand,
On Earth, in Hell,
Sick or Well,
On Sea, on Land,
On the Square, ever.
It ended—the intervening verses dare not be quoted—
Stiff or in Breath,
Lag or Free,
You and Me,
In Life, in Death,
On the Cross, never.
They all then drank a cup of blood taken from the veins of each man.
After these rites were performed, the Ring would conduct their business, usually involving a trial and sentence of suspected collaborators among the convict population or of any of their gaolers who showed an inclination to be lenient to the prisoners.
At first look, the florid stories of the Ring seem more like a Masonic or occult order than a self-protection association of convicts on a remote Pacific island. Certainly Warung had a fertile imagination and colourful writing style. Historians have also pointed out that evidence for the existence of such an elaborate organisation depends on a single documented mention of Norfolk Island convicts defying their gaolers—not an uncommon event.
But despite the absence of historical evidence, the story of the Ring lives on, along with the darker suspicions about the depravity, degradation and despair of the Norfolk Island ‘system’. While the secret order of the Ring and some of the more extreme events alleged to have occurred may be exaggerated, the remaining realities of Norfolk Island were horrifying enough to support the belief that an organisation like the Ring could have, and perhaps should have, existed.
The melancholy death of Captain Logan
Captain Patrick Logan was in charge of the Moreton Bay penal settlement on the Brisbane River from 1826. His tenure was notorious among convicts for its extreme cruelty, especially floggings while lashed to the ‘triangle’, a wooden structure designed to spreadeagle its victims to ensure maximum infliction of the lash across the back of the body.
In October 1830, Logan lost his life in an attack by ‘natives’, as Aborigines were invariably described in the nineteenth century. Captain Clunie of the 17th Regiment reported the details, as far as they could be ascertained, to the Colonial Secretary in Sydney on 6 November 1830. Logan was returning home from a mapping expedition near Mount Irwin when he became separated from his party. They went to find him a day or so later:
… we naturally concluded he had fallen into the hands of the natives, and hoped he might be a prisoner and alive, parties were sent out in every direction to endeavour to meet them; while, in the meantime, his servant and party found his saddle, with the stirrups cut off as if by a native’s hatchet, about ten miles from the place where Captain Logan left them, in the direction of the Limestone station. Near to this place, also, were the marks of his horse having been tied to a tree, of his having himself slept upon some grass in a bark hut, and having apparently been roasting chestnuts, when he made some rapid strides towards his horse, as if surprised by natives. No further traces, however, could be discovered, and though the anxiety of his family and friends were most distressing, hopes were still entertained of his being alive till the 28th ultimo, when Mr Cowper, whose exertions on this occasion were very great, and for which I feel much indebted, discovered the dead horse sticking in a creek, and not far from it, at the top of the bank, the body of Captain Logan buried about a foot under ground. Near this also were found papers torn in pieces, his boots, and part of his waistcoat, stained with blood.
From all these circumstances it appears probable that while at this place, where he had stopped for the night, Captain Logan was suddenly surprised by natives; that he mounted his horse without saddle or bridle, and, being unable to manage him, the horse, pursued by the natives, got into the creek, where Captain Logan, endeavouring to extricate him, was overtaken and murdered.
Logan’s pregnant widow had his body shipped to Sydney for burial, mourning the loss of her husband as the captain’s colleagues regretted the loss of an efficient commander. But the convicts reacted very differently.
Some time after Logan’s death a new ballad began to circulate, and has done ever since. The song told the story of an Irish convict transported to Moreton Bay, where he meets another prisoner who tells him:
I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie,
At Norfolk Island, and Emu Plains;
At Castle Hill and cursed Toongabbee—
At all those places I’ve worked in chains:
But of all the places of condemnation,
In each penal station of New South Wales,
To Moreton Bay I found no equal,
For excessive tyranny each day prevails.
Early in the morning when day is dawning,
To trace from heaven the morning dew,
Up we are started at a moment’s warning,
Our daily labour to renew.
Our overseers and superintendents—
These tyrants’ orders we must obey,
Or else at the triangles our flesh is mangled—
Such are our wages at Moreton Bay!
For three long years I’ve been beastly treated;
Heavy irons each day I wore;
My back from flogging has been lacerated,
And oftimes painted wit
h crimson gore.
Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews,
We were oppressed under Logan’s yoke,
Till kind Providence came to our assistance,
And gave this tyrant his mortal stroke.
The song ends with an expression of gratitude in the lines:
My fellow-prisoners, be exhilarated,
That all such monsters such a death may find:
For it’s when from bondage we are liberated,
Our former sufferings will fade from mind.
The death of Logan was such a great moment in convict culture that its impact continued for another 50 years or more. The event was still very much alive in Ned Kelly’s mind when he composed the Jerilderie Letter in the late 1870s:
… more was transported to Van Diemand’s Land to pine their young lives away in starvation and misery among tyrants worse than the promised hell itself all of true blood bone and beauty, that was not murdered on their own soil, or had fled to America or other countries to bloom again another day, were doomed to Port Mcquarie Toweringabbie norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyrany and condemnation many a blooming Irishman rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke Were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains but true to the shamrock and a credit to Paddys land.
Before that, a convict known as Francis MacNamara would get the credit for composing the ballad of Logan’s death. Whether he did or not, his story is another memorable tale of the convict era.
A Convict’s Tour to Hell
Francis MacNamara—better known to his convict peers by the moniker of ‘Frank the Poet’—may have penned the original version of the powerful lament of ‘Moreton Bay’, although he did not arrive in Australia until twelve years after Logan’s death.
Arriving in Sydney in 1832 for the crime of breaking a shop window and stealing a ‘piece of worsted plaid’, MacNamara was one of the convict period’s greatest characters. Like many of his Irish fellow convicts, he had a passionate hatred of the English and the convict system. Unlike most, he also had the ability to express his antagonism in witty and satirical verse. MacNamara’s work was often more ambitious than the usual doggerel of the street ballads and included a parody of the literary versions of the mythic descent into the underworld theme, notable in the work of Dante and Swift. A Convict’s Tour to Hell is a small masterpiece in which Frank dreams that he has died and, like Dante, must journey through the underworld to find his true resting place for all eternity. He visits Purgatory, which he finds full of priests and popes ‘weeping wailing gnashing’ and suffering the ‘torments of the newest fashion’. He journeys on to Hell: