by Paul Collins
The entrance at Hell’s Gates is at 42°11’ south latitude, so it is directly in the path of the Roaring Forties. For thousands of miles to the west there is nothing but open sea and roaring winds that pick up enormous speed and moisture. The first land mass that they strike is the west coast of Tasmania. It is this constant westerly wind that determines not only the weather, but also much of the vegetation of Macquarie Harbour and the whole of the south-west. It is a land of strong winds, squalls, storms, rain, sleet, snow and a kind of saturating dampness that penetrates into the very core of your being, especially in winter. When Pearce arrived at Macquarie Harbour in July 1822 it was midwinter and wet, overcast conditions were constant. At this time of the year, the days are short: the sun rises at about seven and sets by five in the afternoon. Even when it is not raining, the sky is usually grey. At Sarah Island a misty and depressing drizzle can settle in for days or even weeks on end, the sun seeming to disappear completely from the world. While the coast is often damp, the steep, rocky inland mountain ranges are exposed to dry electrical storms.
On average the west coast of Tasmania gets about 2586 millimetres (about 102 inches) of rain per year. July, August and September are the wettest as well as the coldest months, and you can get snow down to 600 metres (1900 feet), which at higher elevations can build up to a depth of more than 10 metres (32 feet). It can sometimes blanket a rainforest completely. But if there is one constant about the weather of the area, it is that it is temperamental.The sun may come out on a mild morning, to be followed by rain or even snow in the afternoon. As people used to the weather in the south-west often say: ‘Don’t worry if it’s pouring rain now; in ten minutes the sun will be out!’
Almost two centuries after Pearce’s time the convict settlement at the southern end of Macquarie Harbour remains claustrophobic, especially in winter. Towering over the southern section is the 1144-metre (3700-foot) Mount Sorell, and in the distance, on the odd occasions when the weather lifts, you can see the 1446-metre (4744-foot) Frenchman’s Cap, which is covered with snow all winter and sometimes even in summer. No one is certain who named this mountain, but probably some cynical wit at Sarah Island noticed that its glacier-formed summit resembled the ‘cap of liberty’, the conical headgear given to Roman slaves on emancipation and used as a republican symbol during the French Revolution. Its ironic name would not have been lost on better educated convicts born in those revolutionary years when the French king was overthrown and executed, and the equality of all people first proclaimed. Perhaps it was the same wit who named Liberty Point and Liberty Bay at the northern end of Macquarie Harbour.
The constraints of Sarah Island and convict life must have been particularly galling to Pearce and his fellow recidivists. While these men were seen by their contemporaries as unredeemable criminals, they were essentially social misfits and cranks, men usually from the lower ranks of society who were unwilling and unable to accept the social and class constraints of an increasingly rigidly structured British society.These were men who did not easily fit in anywhere.They had been born at a time when equality, democracy and the rights of man and the citizen were proclaimed by the American Revolution and the French Republic. They had grown up during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and had come to manhood in a time of profound social unrest in Britain and Ireland. This unrest was as much economic and social as it was political. The machine age was beginning, population pressures were increasing, and landless and dispossessed small farmers were being forced by economic circumstances into the ugliness of the burgeoning industrial cities. Many people were understandably Luddite: they tried to destroy the machines and the new social structures that had abolished the way of life that their families had followed for centuries. In the words of the poet William Blake, England’s ‘mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’ were increasingly being replaced by ‘those dark satanic mills’.
Many of the men who ended up at Sarah Island were the byproduct of industrialisation. And much of their protest against the constraints of prison life was really the expression of their unwillingness to accept the social, political and economic process in which they were caught.
In the early years of the Macquarie Harbour settlement, in order to try to break their spirit, most of the prisoners were used in what amounted to slave labour in logging operations at various places on the mainland, primarily around Kelly’s Basin, which was a narrow bay about 8 kilometres (5 miles) almost directly east of Sarah Island. They also worked up the Gordon River at the southern end of the harbour.
In both places the predominant vegetation is cool temperate rainforest, which nowadays is very rare anywhere in the world, making up only about 5 per cent of all remaining rainforests on earth. In the northern hemisphere cool temperate rainforests are found only in isolated pockets around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, such as in the United States’s Pacific Northwest, and Canada’s coastal British Columbia.There are also small pockets in south-eastern China. But the last strongholds are in the southern hemisphere – in far southern Chile, in a few areas in New Zealand, and in southern Australia. These are some of the rarest and most important forests in the world.
But even in Australia they are under threat. Probably one of the largest continuous cool temperate rainforests anywhere in the world was in Gippsland in south-eastern Victoria, especially in the Strzelecki Ranges. These low, rolling hills were covered until the beginning of the twentieth century with rainforest containing some of the tallest trees in the world: the great mountain ash with the wonderful botanical name Eucalyptus regnans (reigning eucalypt), which often grow more than 50 metres (162 feet) in height, and which are known to have reached 100 metres (325 feet). Only a minuscule portion of this magnificent and massive virgin rainforest now survives: in total about 2500 hectares (about 6000 acres), mainly in a couple of tiny national parks, out of an original 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres). After the final destruction of the rainforests in central Gippsland early in the twentieth century, the most extensive remaining examples in the world of these now very rare forests occur on the Errinundra plateau and surrounding areas in far-eastern Victoria, and in western Tasmania. It is for this reason that a considerable proportion of the southwest of Tasmania was declared a World Heritage Area in 1982, in the face of last-ditch legal manoeuvring by the state government. Even today large tracts of rainforest and other environmentally valuable forests remain outside the protected areas, and some of them are still being logged for export woodchips to Asia.
The other determining element in the formation of the south-west is the geological history of the landscape, which largely took on its present shape through the recurrent ice ages of the mid- to late-Pleistocene period (from about 30,000 to 9000 years ago).You only have to look at a map of the south-west to see that the mountain ranges run either almost due north-south, or north-west by south-east, thus creating a protective barrier between the land affected by the extreme weather patterns of the Southern Ocean and the flatter, dryer uplands and midland plains of central, north-eastern and south-eastern Tasmania. The mountains of the south-west are made up of a series of ranges and peaks that vary in height from 600 to 1600 metres (1950 to 5200 feet) above sea level. Flowing down from and in between these mountains are three short but spectacular river systems, rushing through narrow, deep valleys, that carry up to twenty times more water than that carried by the much longer, slower-moving mainland rivers of south-eastern Australia. In the northern half of the west coast are the Arthur and the Pieman systems; in the southern part of the south-west is the Gordon–Franklin system, which is central to the story of Pearce and his fellow escapees.
The Gordon is the most important river in western Tasmania. It rises near the centre of the island and drains a vast area of both the central-west and south-west. After flowing through treacherous rapids and the Gordon Gorge, it is now trapped in a vast hydro-electric dam called Lake Gordon, completed in November 1974. Just to the south of this pondage is another dam that impounds Lak
e Pedder. Only a tiny 60 megawatts of power are produced by this vast impoundment, which has drowned a whole series of valleys. Below the Gordon dam wall a series of other streams flow into the river, including the Franklin, and these all eventually drain into Macquarie Harbour just south of Sarah Island. In 1979 another proposal was put forward to dam the Gordon just below its confluence with the Franklin. Again a whole pristine river system would have been drowned. A three and a half year campaign was waged against this proposal worldwide and eventually, by the narrowest of margins, the High Court of Australia overruled the Tasmanian government’s determination to destroy the Gordon below its confluence with the Franklin.
The most important recent factor in the shaping of the south-western mountains has been glaciation and the freezing and thawing of water. A series of ice ages began about 730,000 years ago and lasted until just 9000 years ago. Sea levels fell as water was absorbed into the ice-sheets, and rose during the warmer intervals. Australia was then connected to Papua New Guinea, and the southern Australian coast reached about 100 kilometres (60 miles) further south into the Great Australian Bight than it does now.There was also a land bridge between the mainland and Tasmania. The glaciers that formed around the mountains of Tasmania tore away at them, creating massive cliffs, deep hollows, moraines and large areas of scree, such as those on Mount Wellington above Hobart Town. Frenchman’s Cap, the mountain that so dominates our escape story, was shaped by the ice and snow of the last ice age.
The last ice age from about 25,000 to 9000 years ago created most of the geological features of the mountains of the south-west. During this cold, dry period the landscape looked something like the contemporary Arctic tundra, with rainforests just surviving along the river valleys and in the wetter areas. We know that Aboriginal people were present in the south-west during at least part of this ice age, the southernmost human beings in the world at the time. With a rise in the earth’s temperatures and sea levels, the rainforests began to expand again from their river valleys and reoccupy the south-west in response to a wetter climate. At the same time the coastal valleys such as Macquarie Harbour and Bathurst Harbour were flooded by rising sea levels. It was at this time that the isthmus leading to the Australian mainland was drowned, creating Bass Strait. Van Diemen’s Land was now an island.
The first detailed descriptions of Macquarie Harbour were provided by three men. The first was the experienced sealer and whaler Captain James Kelly, born of uncertain paternity in the town of Parramatta, just to the west of Sydney, in November 1791. The second was Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, born at Norfolk Island in 1791, the son of Governor King. King junior mapped Macquarie Harbour in December to January 1819–20. The third was the Deputy Surveyor-General of Van Diemen’s Land, George Evans, who accompanied the first settlement at Sarah Island.
Kelly told Commissioner Bigge in May 1820 that he had been to the harbour seven times, and that the entrance was very tricky and narrow, requiring the wind to be from exactly a northerly direction for a ship to negotiate its way through safely. The vessel also needed to be of shallow draft. Getting into any harbour was difficult for sailing ships because they were so dependent on wind direction and velocity, and in adverse weather many harbour entrances were almost impossible to negotiate. This was particularly so at Macquarie Harbour. Evans advised that if the wind was contrary, especially if it was an easterly, a ship would simply have to lie outside the entrance in a roadstead: a safe place to ride at anchor. There was one situated on the ocean side to the south-west of the Macquarie Harbour entrance – Edwards Bay, which was protected to some extent by Trumpeter Rock to the north-west and Olsen Reef to the southwest. Here a ship could anchor safely until the wind came around to a northerly. Nevertheless, anchoring could still be a tall order as there was not a lot of shelter from the winds and massive swells that rolled in from the west. Sometimes vessels had to wait for days, even weeks, to negotiate the entrance, which was about 80 yards (72 metres) wide.
For the captain, helmsman and pilot, steering a ship through the entrance could be a hair-raising experience, especially if the sea was up to any extent, and impossible when a really big sea was running. It must have been even worse for the passengers, who were sometimes ordered below deck for passage into the harbour. There was an outer sandbar with only 8 to 9 feet clearance (2.5 metres) at high tide, and Kelly warned that the tides in the area were often unpredictable. After passing the outer bar, there was a narrow channel between shoals and rocks, and mariners often had to contend with a very strong undertow out of the harbour. Beyond the channel there was a shifting inner bar, again with only about an 8-foot clearance at high tide. Even today, after a lot of dredging has been done in the entrance and a massive breakwater built on the south-west side, the channel is still very narrow and deceptive and requires extremely careful navigation. It was not for nothing that right from the beginning the entrance was called ‘Hell’s Gates’. Often in the early days of the penal settlement, ships would have to unload their cargo to lighten themselves before negotiating the entrance, and then reload once they had got through.
About 35 kilometres (22 miles) sou’-sou’-east from the entrance is Sarah Island, the location chosen for the settlement. Just across from Sarah Island is tiny Grummet Island, which is about 385 metres (400 yards) in circumference. It soon became a place for the punishment of those for whom even secondary punishment was insufficient. It also housed the convict hospital.
As preparations proceeded in Hobart Town for the formation of the penal settlement, one of the most important decisions facing Sorell was the appointment of a commandant. The man chosen was Lieutenant John Cuthbertson of the 48th Regiment of Foot, an Irish-born career soldier of thirty-five, who had been granted a lieutenancy in 1808. He had been praised for bravery at the Battle of Talavera (27–8 July 1809) near Toledo in Spain during the British campaign against the Napoleonic occupation of the Iberian peninsula. It was the two battalions of the 48th that saved the day at Talavera and decided the battle. In a moment of great danger, the English Commander, Sir Arthur Wellesley (afterwards Duke of Wellington, victor at Waterloo, and Prime Minister from 1828–30), ordered the 48th to advance against the French line, which they did with admirable discipline and steadiness. It was their moment of glory.The regiment continued fighting in the Peninsular Campaign in Spain and suffered heavy casualties. They had a stint in Ireland after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and then a battalion of the regiment was sent to New South Wales from Cork in 1817. A detachment of about 250 officers and men – out of a total of 800 in Australia – were sent to Van Diemen’s Land with their wives and families.
Among them was the unmarried Lieutenant Cuthbertson. By mid-1818 he was serving in various capacities, especially in the supervision of convict road gangs. Sorell had a high opinion of him, and his experience with convicts seemed to make him a natural choice as the first Commandant at Macquarie Harbour. His pay for this hardship posting was reasonably good for the time: seven shillings and sixpence per day. When he established the Sarah Island settlement Sorell was adamant that heavy work was to be the centrepiece of the reform process. He told Cuthbertson to make sure that every convict was involved in ‘constant, active, unremitting employment . . . in very hard labour’. Cuthbertson and his successors took their instructions seriously and eventually made Sarah Island the only penal settlement in the Australian colonies that covered its costs and turned a profit for the government. The prison’s lumber production became very lucrative and was the most important form of labour in the first years of the settlement.
Cuthbertson’s power over the convicts was almost absolute. As a magistrate and justice of the peace he could sentence recalcitrant prisoners who broke any of the numerous regulations to solitary confinement never exceeding fourteen days, or up to 100 lashes with the particularly nasty cat-o’-nine-tails used on Sarah Island. Cuthbertson was seen by the convicts as a sadistic bully; the punishments handed out by him, and his successor, Lieutenant Samuel Wrig
ht of the 3rd Regiment, which replaced the 48th in 1823, seem to support the view that they both had sadistic tendencies. Many convicts at Sarah Island saw commandants like Cuthbertson and Wright as ‘inhuman tyrants’, with one relatively literate prisoner making an unflattering comparison with the Roman Emperor Nero.
But the problems facing these soldiers in the very isolated places of secondary punishment like Macquarie Harbour were enormous. By August–September 1822 there were about 170 convicts on the island, and Cuthbertson only had a ‘Lieutenant’s Guard’ of seventeen non-commissioned officers and soldiers to support him. Usually four of these men were at the pilot’s station at the harbour’s entrance at Hell’s Gates, and he had already lost two soldiers in a wild-goose chase after eight convicts who bolted from the settlement in early March 1822. That left only eleven men on the island itself, where the possibility of a convict revolt would always have been at the back of the Commandant’s mind.
This never eventuated. A small number of guards can control much larger numbers of prisoners if the regime is geared to keep those incarcerated constantly on the defensive.This was achieved at Macquarie Harbour through the use of exhausting work and detailed regulations which were enforced with the threat and imposition of brutal punishment. They were to grind down the will to resist. So, rather than saying that Cuthbertson was a sadistic bully, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was a somewhat brutalised soldier who had some glory at Talavera and who now had to live and work in a very dangerous environment in which he had the power to take whatever steps he thought necessary to fulfil his instructions and to keep the situation under control.There was also a sense in which the careers of most of the civil and military officers at Sarah Island had reached the bottom of the bucket; you certainly would not accept a posting in such a place if you could avoid it. These were men with nowhere else to go.