by Paul Collins
This period saw constant conflict between blacks and whites. Shepherding close to the frontier was dangerous; the Aborigines did not hesitate to spear isolated settlers and shepherds, as well as their flocks. On their part the whites acted with appalling violence, especially toward Aboriginal women. Rape and abduction of Aboriginal women and unprovoked massacres were common. By the end of the decade there was open warfare between the Aboriginal owners of the land and white squatters. Eventually this would lead to the widespread destruction of traditional Aboriginal life and to the decimation and large-scale removal of the Aboriginal people.
The porous borders of the settlement meant that it was easy for assigned convicts to slip away into the bush and form bandit groups of ‘bushrangers’, as these men were called from the early days of the colony. Having bolted from Scattergood’s run, Pearce joined a group of four other escaped convicts. According to a Government Order of 10 February 1821, they had escaped from the county jail, a more serious offence than merely absconding from assignment. No doubt Pearce and his companions – James Letting,Thomas Lawton, Joseph Saunders and Thomas Atkinson – lived largely by stealing sheep from isolated flocks. If they had firearms – and they may well have done – they would have also been able to shoot ‘boomers’, as fully grown kangaroos were called, as well as indulging in the occasional hold-up of isolated travellers and raiding lonely farms. Men on the run grouped together like this in order to survive and gain some protection in numbers from attacks by the Aborigines.
These banditti, as bushrangers were also called, had reached epidemic proportions under Sorell’s drunken and womanising predecessor, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Davey – ‘Mad Tom’ as the convicts and lower orders nicknamed him – who was Lieutenant-Governor from 1813 to 1817. Although Macquarie kept harping on Davey’s ‘dissipated and profligate’ ways (he often slept with convict women), and the ‘extraordinary degree of frivolity and low buffoonery in his manners’ (it was said he often made rude faces at people on social occasions), he was popular with ordinary folk in Hobart Town because he was convivial, down-to-earth and often drank with them in public houses. But his administration was hamstrung by Macquarie’s restrictive regulations, by a lack of resources from the home government and by the corruption of many of his officials.
From early 1815 to 1817 several gangs of convict bushrangers dominated the countryside. The best known group was led by Michael Howe, who called himself the ‘Governor of the Ranges’. Davey tried to deal with the banditti by declaring martial law. When Sorell arrived in April 1817 he planned not only to capture the bushrangers with military force, but also to break the hold that they had on the poorer free colonists and ex-convicts who supported them. Within eighteen months the ‘old man’, as the white-headed 43-year-old Sorell was popularly called, had captured, tried and hung members of the Mike Howe gang. Howe himself was betrayed by a friend, and captured and killed by two bounty hunters in October 1818. Bushranging gangs were often riven by internal quarrels and tensions and informing on each other became common, especially if a reward was offered. However, the task of controlling bandits was ongoing; in the first part of 1821 ten out of twenty-six captured bushrangers were hung in Hobart Town. The others were sentenced to long prison terms. Order was very slowly restored to the settled districts, only for bushranging to erupt again with renewed ferocity with the Brady gang in 1824 to 1826.
The bushranging pattern was not forgotten by the convicts, and there was a constant flow of disgruntled prisoners absconding into the bush and forming groups like the one Pearce was in now. Pearce and his four companions were on the loose for about three months and probably moved around in about a 40-kilometre (25-mile) arc from the north-west of New Norfolk to the north-east of Hobart Town. Except for the river valleys, 43 per cent of the land surface at the time of European settlement was dry and wet sclerophyll woodland on extensive plateaux, dominated at the lower elevations by open eucalypt forests and by tall eucalypt forests at the higher, wetter levels. The area east to north-east of Hobart Town comprised already settled country.
This first period of absconding toughened Pearce up and taught him a little of how to survive in the Tasmanian bush. It also prepared him for the ruthless personal interactions that occurred between men who were living outside normal, ordered, civilised society and whose aim was focused on personal survival. He learned how to sort out who could be trusted and who could not, and about the loyalty and class solidarity of assigned convicts and small farmers, most of whom were ex-convicts. These people often lived largely outside the law themselves, and were regularly caught up in sheep-stealing and cattle-rustling, both capital offences. They were usually ready to provide help and information for convicts who had bolted. For these people class loyalty far outweighed obedience to government and authority.
There were several reasons why men like Pearce and his mates were not caught for months. First, the country itself: it was studded with wooded hills, mountains, narrow valleys and swathes of thick bush that provided hiding places everywhere. Even where the forest was open, it was easy to outrun and hide from a small force of pursuing soldiers. Large areas, some close to Hobart Town, were only semi-explored in 1821, and the population was spread fairly thinly.What habitation there was tended to follow the river valleys or the roads.This left expanses of open and closed woodland country where ex-convicts could hide for months on end from the prying eyes of authority. Even when they were recaptured it was often more by accident than design.
Secondly, the government was acutely short of trained personnel to police the colony. Constables were usually ex-convicts themselves, largely untrained, and their only pay was their keep. They were often unreliable. Sorell had very few troops at his disposal and would not have been in a position to deal with a serious revolt, and convict rebellion was always a lurking fear for the governments of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. When Pearce arrived in early 1820 the military contingent consisted of a commander, Brevet-Major Thomas Bell, four subalterns (officers below the rank of captain – that is, lieutenants) and ninety-two non-commissioned officers and privates. In the north around Port Dalrymple, George Town and Launceston, numbers varied but there were usually about 150 officers and men. According to the 1821 Muster the population of Hobart Town and the surrounding areas was 5542, and in the northern district there were 1643 people – a total of 7185. Of these 3827 were serving convicts, 1047 were either ex-convicts or had some form of pardon or ticket-of-leave, 1119 had come free to the colony, and 1192 were children. That means that a little over two thirds of the population were either convicts or ex-convicts.
Convicts were dispersed through assignment so they were more easily controlled, and the threat of the lash kept them on the back foot. The only concerted attempt to overthrow the government in Australia was the almost spontaneous rebellion in 1805 at Castle Hill in New South Wales, which mainly involved Irish convicts, and which was put down by the authorities with a viciousness born of a fear of convict revolt and a profound loathing for the Irish.
Pearce and his four mates might well have avoided recapture if they had not surrendered under an amnesty in late March 1821. We do not have a copy of this amnesty, but it no doubt resembled the one proclaimed nine months later in New South Wales by Macquarie’s successor, Brigadier-General Sir Thomas Brisbane, on 15 December 1821. Brisbane’s amnesty assured prisoners of the Crown and others who ‘have absconded and are now at large within the woods in the interior of the colony’ and who maintain themselves by pillage and rapine, that if they surrender before 31 January 1822 they will ‘receive a full and sufficient pardon and go wholly free and unpunished’, unless they had committed murder, or highway or house robbery with violence. It was a good deal, and Pearce and the others were probably now sick of living off the land and eating stolen sheep and boomers. They were ready for a few rums with their old mates. The Hobart Town Gazette of 5 May 1821 reports that they came out of the bush on Wednesday, 2 May and surrendered to Lieutenant John
Cuthbertson of the 48th Regiment at the Coal River. Something must have happened at the time of the surrender or just before because the Gazette reported that one of the escapees, Atkinson, had had his hand blown off.
Sorell had a high opinion of Cuthbertson, who at that stage was in charge of a large gang of convicts working on the road to Coal River and Pitt Water, at a salary of five shillings per day. Thirteen months later Pearce would meet Cuthbertson again in very different circumstances.
The five of them were brought back to town in early May. But on 18 May Pearce was before Magistrate Humphrey, charged with ‘embezzling two turkeys and three ducks, the property of Messrs Stynes and Troy’, two ex-convicts who had a farm at Coal River. Whether this ‘embezzling’ happened before or just after their surrender we do not know. If Sorell’s amnesty was worded in the same way as Brisbane’s, one would have expected that a bit of petty-thieving would have been covered if it had occurred before the convicts’ surrender. But given Pearce’s personality, it might well have happened after they handed themselves over to Cuthbertson, while they were waiting to be taken back to Hobart Town.
Magistrate Humphrey sentenced Pearce to fifty lashes and to labouring the same hours as the jail gang for fourteen days, and to confinement in the watch-house at night. Sometime in July he was assigned to Constable Thomas Cane, but was still held in custody at night. He was back in court again on 7 July, this time not as an accused, but as a witness. He not only knew who had perpetrated a robbery, but also where the stolen goods were hidden. At the same time he had a perfect alibi: he had been locked up in the watch-house all night at the time of the robbery! The victim, a ticket-of-leave man named Hugh Morgan, approached Pearce and promised him a shirt, jacket and pair of trousers if he could get the property back. Pearce was able to recover some of the stolen goods for Morgan. Convict No. 102 did not miss an opportunity to dob in and use his mates when it suited his purposes. For Pearce there was to be no honour among thieves.
He managed to stay out of trouble until 17 September, when he was up before Humphrey again on charges of being drunk and disorderly and absent from his lodgings in the watch-house. This time the bench sentenced him to twenty-five lashes.
Three days later Pearce stole a wheelbarrow from the premises of one William Barrell, presumably to sell it in order to buy grog. This time Magistrate Humphrey sentenced him to fifty lashes and to six months’ hard labour in the jail gang – in other words, working in irons for the government. Thus in six and a half months he had received 175 lashes, 100 of those within five days.
By the statistics of the convict period there was nothing extraordinary about this rate of punishment. Today most Australians would find flogging and most other kinds of physical discipline repugnant, even though we live in a world in which many governments systematically use torture as a means of maintaining their power. Physical and psychological torture are still widespread. The British military and navy used the lash to enforce discipline on soldiers and sailors until well into the late nineteenth century. The military lash was also used on convicts, and it was not until the 1930s that it was abolished in United Kingdom prisons as a way of administering the penal system.
From the seventeenth century local English magistrates had a lot of power over neighbourhood issues involving policing, law enforcement and punishment, and that system was reflected in early Australia. Police Superintendent Humphrey complained to Commissioner Bigge in March 1820 that single magistrates were limited to ordering fifty lashes and six months’ imprisonment for each offence, and that two or more magistrates could not exceed 100 lashes and twelve months in the jail gang. However, this was clearly more honoured in the breach than the observance because two months later the Chief Constable of Van Diemen’s Land informed Bigge that just the day before he had supervised five men receiving 200 lashes each, and two others 150 each.There is overwhelming evidence that throughout penal Australia, magistrates regularly exceeded the limits laid down by both the law and the governor’s instructions.
The 100-lash limit was sixty-one more than courts in the United States could hand out to slaves at the same period. Americans felt themselves bound by the biblical thirty-nine lashes, derived from Saint Paul, who told the Corinthians (II Cor. 11:24) that ‘Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one; three times I was beaten with rods’. In the Book of Deuteronomy (25:3) Jewish judges were limited to inflicting forty lashes, because ‘if more lashes than these are given, your neighbour will be degraded in your sight’. No such religious or human sensitivities operated in the convict system. In Australia men were flogged for what seem to us very minor offences. Laziness got you twenty-five lashes, as did insolence and swearing. Repeat offenders normally copped fifty no matter what the charge and, in places of secondary punishment like Macquarie Harbour, careless damage to tools or even items of clothing or slops also merited fifty. Flogging became so much part of convict life that a whole slang vocabulary grew up around it: a ‘Botany Bay dozen’ referred to twenty-five lashes, a ‘bob’ meant fifty lashes, a ‘bull’ seventy-five, and a ‘canary’ one hundred. The term ‘red shirt’ came to describe a flogged man’s back.
So what actually happened when men were flogged? Pearce and the other convicts sentenced by the magistrates to corporal punishment would have been marched into the jail-yard the following morning. In Hobart Town the floggings were usually carried out under the supervision of the Chief Constable, Richard Pitt. Either the newly appointed Acting Colonial Surgeon, James Scott from the Castle Forbes, who had now settled in Van Diemen’s Land, or more likely his assistant, Rowland R. Priest, would have been in attendance or close by; they could stop the flogging if they considered that the man being punished would be seriously injured. Pearce and his fellow prisoners would have been whipped either by a constable or a volunteer convict. Convict-floggers were considered by their fellow convicts the lowest of the low, class traitors of the very worst sort. Sometimes the flogger and the constable could be bribed to go easy on the victim, especially if there was no supervisor present, although it is unlikely that Pearce would have been able to find the money required.
Pearce would have been tied firmly to a triangular frame that was anchored to the ground, his hands secured together above his head, his feet attached to the base of the frame at ground level. He would have been stripped to the waist. Sometimes prisoners were stripped stark naked if they were to be whipped on the ‘breech’ (backside), as well as the back. Colonial magistrates had wide discretion, and this form of punishment could be ordered if the crime was considered particularly heinous, especially if the prisoner was convicted of buggery.The ‘cats’ (whips) were made of up to nine strands (usually there were three or four) of thick twine with knots, attached to a wooden handle. Most men began to bleed from the welts on their backs after three or four lashes. It took an average scourger about five or six minutes to hand out fifty lashes. Given that Pearce had been flogged just a few days previously, his wounds would have quickly reopened, the blood would have flowed down his back and trousers, and pieces of flesh would have been scattered around. It was an agonising process, and at the end of it he would have had difficulty standing or walking without assistance, and would have had to spend some days in hospital before he could start the second part of his sentence – work in the chain gang for six months.
It is a real temptation for us to want to ignore how degrading flogging was, and how the British legal system condoned such sadistic violence. Nevertheless, corporal punishment was central to the control of convicts in Australia. It helps to explain how such a small military force and a corrupt and inefficient police contingent were able to prevent serious revolt against the government.The imposition of such a draconian punishment on the convicts kept them always on the defensive. By using the lash, the authorities maintained the initiative, and by having it sanctioned by the courts, they maintained the legal high ground.
That is why flogging was maintained right up until the end of the syst
em in the 1860s. Certainly, things had not changed a decade after Pearce’s fifty lashes. The superintendent of the Hyde Park Convict Barracks in Sydney from 1833 to 1834, Ernest Augustus Slade, described some typical floggings to the 1837 British Parliamentary Select Committee on Transportation. Slade was an ex-soldier whose deadpan reportage to the members of the House of Commons gives a vivid sense of the reality of flogging. For instance, he says that a convict named William Graham who had been absent without leave was sentenced to twenty-five lashes. Slade reports that Graham’s skin was lacerated at the thirteenth lash and that at the fifteenth ‘the convict appeared to suffer great pain; but during the whole of the punishment he did not utter a word, nor groaned; but when cast loose the expression of his countenance indicated much suffering’. A man who copped his flogging without crying out was known by other prisoners as ‘flash’ or ‘game’. This was the first time that Graham had been flogged. Calvin Simpson was sentenced to fifty lashes for stealing a pair of shoes. Slade says that ‘blood flowed at the fourth; the convict cried out at the eighteenth and continued crying for a few succeeding lashes; his skin was considerably torn, and blood flowed during the whole of the punishment’. Simpson groaned and prayed while suffering his sentence, and Slade says that he was of the opinion that he was sufficiently punished at the twenty-fifth lash. Thomas Holdsworth had pilfered goods from his master, and the magistrate had sentenced him to fifty lashes. Slade’s description paints a miserable scene: ‘At the first lash the prisoner uttered piercing screams and continued screaming at each succeeding lash, and appeared to suffer greatly; the fifth lash brought blood, and the flesh was considerably lacerated at the conclusion of the punishment. This man says he was never flogged before, nor did there appear on his back any marks of former punishment. I am of the opinion that he was sufficiently punished at the twenty-fifth lash, for his bodily strength was nearly exhausted, as was manifested by his staggering gait when cut loose.’