Hell's Gates

by Paul Collins

  These were not people who surrendered their land easily to the white invasion in which Alexander Pearce was a minor player. They fought a long and hard battle for their traditions and their spiritual connection to place, but they were eventually overcome by the sheer weight of numbers of arriving Europeans. James Erskine Calder commented later that ‘Whatever the future historian of Tasmania might have to say, he will do them [the Aborigines] an injustice if he fails to record that, as a body, they held their ground bravely for thirty years against the invaders of their beautiful domains’. There is an important coda to this narrative that is hardly ever mentioned or commented on by even the best recent historians.There is good evidence that small groups of Aborigines, perhaps just families or even clans, survived the massacres, diseases and the Robinson clearances, and remained uncontacted and living freely in the bush. The best clue to this comes again from Calder. In 1847 Governor William Denison had decided to bring the remnants of the Aborigines from the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island back to Van Diemen’s Land.The news of this stimulated Calder to write to the Governor on 8 August 1847 to tell him that ‘In my numerous rambles through the unsettled Western districts [of Van Diemen’s Land], many circumstances have led me to believe that there still exists at large, at least one tribe of natives who have never been in captivity’. Calder says that he is convinced that this ‘is much more than merely probable’ (his emphasis). He gives a series of examples from his own experience and that of other bushmen, of the discovery of individual Aborigines or small groups, well after the banishment of the remnants of the tribes to Flinders Island in 1834. Most of these encounters occurred in the south-western and northern sections of the colony.

  To support his assertion he cites the capture of a small group up at Dee Marsh on the north-westernmost tip of the island near Cape Grim in late 1842 or early 1843. Calder also speaks of his personal experience of clear signs of Aboriginal habitation and presence in1840 in the south-west, and he refers to the observations of other experienced bushmen who saw evidence that Aborigines were still at large. In conclusion, he comments to Governor Denison that ‘there can be little doubt that the primitive inhabitants of this island were never wholly removed from it, and that at least a few escaped capture, and while these have had the wisdom to avoid appearing in the settled districts, they have not wholly evaded observation’.

  We can only be thankful that a few, at least, escaped for a while what in practice amounted to an attempt, even if unconscious and unarticulated, to remove and even eliminate a group of people from their traditional lands. Nowadays most people would call that ‘genocide’.

  Back on the other side of the frontier, and coming up to the present day, I have to admit that it is a bit of an occupational hazard for me, having spent thirty-two years in priestly ministry, to be always looking for a moral to every narrative, even to our story of Alexander Pearce and his companions.

  But the more you think about it, the more you are struck by the eschatological implications of this tale. ‘Eschatology’ is the particular branch of theology that deals with the ‘last things’ – death, judgement, heaven and hell. In a way, it is a passion to work out the ultimate meaning of things, to give events their widest context. This narrative is partly about different perceptions of heaven and hell. It is also about the fact that beauty and meaning are both very much in the eye of the beholder. For Convict No. 102 and his fellow prisoners, Macquarie Harbour, the Gordon River, Frenchman’s Cap, the remnant rainforests of Gondwana and everything else about south-western Tasmania were infernal. In this place of secondary punishment they experienced the natural world as hell on earth. For some of them, being hung was a better option and they committed murder in order to be taken back to Hobart Town for trial and execution. It was their only way of escaping from Sarah Island.

  Yet for many of us today, especially for those of us who have developed an ecological sensitivity, the south-west has become a heavenly natural wonderland where we go for spiritual renewal and refreshment. It provides a sense of meaning and purpose that our debased technological world fails to give us. However, this notion can be very naive and romantic because it fails to take into account the ambivalent character of nature and its brutal objectivity and otherness. It is so easy to forget that we need it much more than it needs us.

  But the fact is that there has been a radical shift in human perception about places like the Tasmanian south-west and this has occurred very recently. At the deepest level this points to a much more integrated view of reality, to a much humbler sense of our place in the cosmos, to the fact that we do not define ourselves and stand over-and-against nature, but are actually part of it.

  There is another final comment that needs to be made. Like Ned Kelly, Alexander Pearce has entered into Australian popular culture. Perhaps he will never be as accepted and acclaimed as widely as Ned, but his story has been popularised in Robert Hughes’s 1987 account of the history of convictism, The Fatal Shore, and in their third album the band Weddings, Parties, Anything have a song written by the band’s founder, Mike Thomas, called ‘A Tale They Won’t Believe’. It recounts the story of the escape and cannibalism, and recalls that Knopwood did not believe Pearce when he told the magistrate the truth. The song has made Pearce accessible to people who would normally never have heard of him.

  What has surprised me is that while I have been writing the book I keep meeting people who have heard of Pearce. Perhaps Hughes and ‘A Tale They Won’t Believe’ are largely responsible for that. But it might also indicate that Convict No. 102 is entering into popular consciousness, and that eventually he might even rival Ned as a national icon.

  Now, that would be an achievement.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  Abbreviations

  ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne University

  Press [References in this book are largely to

  Volumes I and II].

  AJCP Australian Joint Copying Project [A National Library of Australia project to copy primary documents of importance to Australia held in UK and Irish archives].

  AOT Archives Office of Tasmania.

  BP Following a numeral it means ‘Before the Present’, e.g. 10,000 BP = 10,000 years ago.

  CON Convict Department [Van Diemen’s Land colonial government].

  CSO Chief Secretary’s Office [Van Diemen’s Land colonial government].

  HRA Historical Records of Australia.

  NLA The National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT.

  PPRST Royal Society of Tasmania: Papers and Proceedings.

  PRO Public Record Office, UK [London and Kew].

  Sprod Dan Sprod, Alexander Pearce of Macquarie Harbour: Convict, Bushranger, Cannibal, Hobart: Cat and Fiddle Press,1977.

  SR NSW State Records Office, New South Wales.

  THRA Tasmanian Historical Research Association.

  West John West, The History of Tasmania with copious information respecting the Colonies of New South Wales Victoria South Australia &c., &c., &c. first published by Henry Dowling in Launceston, 1852. Republished by Angus & Robertson (Sydney, 1971) and edited by A. G. L. Shaw.

  General Sources

  Throughout the writing of this work I have regularly referred to Dan Sprod’s indispensable Alexander Pearce of Macquarie Harbour [details above]. Everyone writing about the Pearce story is in Sprod’s debt. Another very helpful book has been Lloyd Robson’s A History of Tasmania:Van Diemen’s Land from the Earliest Times to 1855, Volume I, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983; see also his The Convict Settlers of Australia: An Enquiry into the Origin and Character of Convicts Transported to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1787–1852, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965.

  Other works that I have found extremely helpful are C. J. Binks, Explorers of Western Tasmania, Devonport: Taswegia, 1989; Richard Flanagan’s A Terrible Beauty: History of the Gordon River Country, Richmond, Vic.: Greenhouse Publications, 1985; Helen Gee and Janet Fenton (eds), T
he South West Book: A Tasmanian Wilderness, Melbourne: Australian Conservation Foundation, 1978; Ken Collins, South-West Tasmania:A Natural History and Visitor’s Guide, Hobart: Heritage Books, 1990. Many people will have read the account of Pearce in Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore: A History of Transportation of Convicts to Australia [London: Collins Harvill, 1987]. He tells the story of Pearce drawing largely on Sprod.

  Prologue

  The geographical area that I am describing in the Prologue nowadays still has a rather isolated feel to it. It can be found on the 1:100,000 Tasmap sheets Shannon and Nive, in the area generally to the north of Brady’s Sugarloaf and in the general vicinity of Victoria Valley Road and Four Mile Marsh and Brown Marsh, to the east of Bronte Park and north of the Lyell Highway. I have also used the Lake Sorell 1:100,000 Tasmap sheet. In other words, the area described is to the north of the Derwent River and west of the confluence of the Ouse and Shannon rivers.

  Something needs to be said specifically about the sources for the Pearce story. There are four distinct narrations of the escape and cannibalism. Two of them are quite detailed. While all of them originate with Pearce himself, since he was the only survivor, none of them was actually written by him. At best he was probably only semi-literate, but without him we would have no idea of what happened on the trek across the wilderness.

  The first account is derived from Pearce’s responses to the interrogation of the Hobart Town magistrate, the Reverend Robert Knopwood, who examined him following his recapture some four months after his first escape from Macquarie Harbour in September 1822. When Pearce described the nightmare journey and confessed the cannibalism to him, Knopwood did not believe him, thinking it was a story concocted to cover for his mates, whom the authorities believed to be still at large. Pearce was sent back to Macquarie Harbour to serve out his original sentence of seven years.

  However, someone else wrote up the narrative in two versions, with the obvious intention of selling the story to the newspapers in Van Diemen’s Land and the home country. In the text I have assumed that this person was the clerk of Lieutenant-Governor Sorell,Thomas Wells, who took down Pearce’s evidence to Knopwood. Some time later the Bench of Magistrates Book for January 1823 disappeared, never to be found again, which was confirmed for me by the ATO in March 2002. Clearly someone (Wells?) could see a financial reward in the extraordinary story, and by getting rid of the Bench of Magistrates Book he (?) made sure that he had an ‘exclusive’. Two almost identical long-hand versions of this narrative have survived. These are usually known as the Knopwood Narrative[s]. One is held in Sydney’s Dixson Library (DL MS3, September 1822) and is entitled ‘Narrative of escape from Macquarie Harbour by Alexander Pierce’, and the other is held in Canberra in the NLA at Ms. 3323, ff. 1–5.

  Pearce also told the story of the first escape in detail to the then Commandant at Macquarie Harbour, Lieutenant John Cuthbertson, after his second escape. This account has also come down to us in narrative form and is part of the evidence given by John Barnes, one-time surgeon at Macquarie Harbour, and is part of an appendix to the second report of the Proceedings of the House of Commons Select Committee on Transportation – the ‘Molesworth Committee’ named after its chairman, the Radical MP Sir William Molesworth. See British Parliamentary Papers – Crime and Punishment.Transportation (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968, Vol. III). This is usually referred to as the Cuthbertson Narrative. However, this narrative has also come down to us in a long-hand written version which is held in Sydney’s Mitchell Library and is headed Pearce’s Narrative (ML A1326). Sprod considers that this Mitchell Library narrative is earlier than the Barnes version, and is either a direct copy of Pearce’s confession to Cuthbertson, or may even be a portion of the original.

  Two other briefer accounts have also survived. It is clear that stories of cannibalism fascinated people in the early nineteenth century, just as they still intrigue us.The first of the short accounts is in the form of a disclosure or ‘confession’ that Pearce made on the night he was sentenced to death to the Keeper of the Hobart Town Jail, John Bisdee. The second is the actual scaffold ‘confession’ read, and probably largely written, by the Reverend Mr Philip Conolly, the Catholic priest who attended Pearce’s execution. The ‘confession’ was reported in detail by the Hobart Town Gazette on 6 August 1824. These two brief accounts only add a few details to the Knopwood and Cuthbertson narratives.

  Both in the Prologue and in retelling the story of the escape, the epic journey across the wilderness and the cannibalism, I have drawn largely on the much more detailed Knopwood and Cuthbertson accounts. Both of these accounts are reproduced by Sprod, pp. 24–50, as are the Bisdee ‘confession’ (pp. 51–3) and the scaffold ‘confession’ (pp. 54–5).

  Sprod (pp. 68–81) deals in great detail with the possibilities in the Knopwood and Cuthbertson narratives about the area of central Tasmania from which Pearce eventually emerged into the settled districts. Pearce says several times that the party’s destination was ‘Table Mountain’, which Sprod has identified with a 1095-metre (3593-foot) hill that is still called Table Mountain. It is situated immediately south of Lake Crescent and to the northwest of the present-day town of Oatlands. Pearce got to know this area when he worked briefly as a shepherd for William Scattergood of New Norfolk, and later when he bolted and was free in the bush after he had absconded in early 1821. Table Mountain, significantly, is almost due east of Macquarie Harbour.

  But Table Mountain proved peculiarly elusive, largely because it was much further east than Pearce had remembered. After he killed Greenhill he ‘proceeded for several days’ and then came to a high hill which he climbed, incorrectly taking it to be Table Mountain, which was still well to the east. This may have been Brady’s Sugarloaf which is almost exactly the same height as Table Mountain (1023 metres/3356 feet). It was probably after this that he came upon the marsh, the small lake and the ducks.

  However, all of this has to be speculation because it depends, as Sprod points out, on which way Pearce and Greenhill came after they crossed the King William Range. The narratives are vague about the exact route taken. Virtually nothing in this landscape was named in 1822–23. Thomas Scott’s Chart of Van Diemen’s Land from the best authorities and from actual Surveys and Measurements (printed in Edinburgh in 1824), representing the situation in about 1822, shows the whole area traversed by the Pearce party to be unknown. Even in the February 1832 map in James Bischoff’s Sketch of the History of Van Diemen’s Land and an account of the Van Diemen’s Land Company (London: John Richardson, 1832, and reprinted by the Libraries Board of South Australia in 1967) gives virtually no detail of the area to the west and north of the Ouse River. These areas had not been explored.

  According to Sprod, there were two possible trajectories as Pearce moved toward the area of white settlement. One was along the Derwent River, which he struck somewhere in the King William Valley or even further south, and which he followed to somewhere between the present-day Cluny Lagoon and the Dunrobin Bridge. The other route has him heading much more to the north, eventually reaching white settlement somewhere close to the confluence of the Ouse and Shannon rivers, just to the north of Victoria Valley and the Osterley districts. This is the course that I have followed in the Prologue.

  For the feel of the landscape and the type of vegetation described in the Prologue I have largely relied on my own observation, but have also drawn on very practical books like Leon Costermans’s Trees of Victoria and Adjoining Areas, Frankston, Vic.: Costermans Publishing, fifth edition, 1994; Ian G. Reid, The Bush: A guide to the vegetated landscapes of Australia, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1994 edition; and James B. Reid et al. (eds), Vegetation of Tasmania [Flora of Australia Supplementary Series, Number 8], published by the Australian Biological Resources Study, 1999.

  For the Aborigines see Lyndall Ryan’s seminal book The Tasmanian Aborigines, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. See also Henry Reynolds’s Fate of a Free People: A radical re
-examination of the Tasmanian wars, Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1995.

  1 ‘I was the convict sent to hell’

  The brief quotation which forms the title of the chapter is taken from Dame Mary Gilmore’s fine poem.The primary source for all of the details of the journey from Cork to New South Wales and on to Hobart Town is Surgeon-Superintendent James Scott’s Diary of Occurrences which can be found in PRO at Admiralty 101/15–17. This can also be found in AJCP at Great Britain. Admiralty. Medical Department’s Registers, medical journals [Adm 101].The Diary gives a daily report on the ship’s position, weather conditions, events on board, and detailed medical reports on the health of both convicts and soldiers. Also helpful is the indent of the Castle Forbes which has been assembled from the Shipping Indents held by SR NSW by Peter Mayberry on his helpful website Irish Convicts to New South Wales 1791–1820.

  For detailed information on nineteenth-century convict ships see Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships, 1788–1868, French’s Forest: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1974. See especially pp. 83–93. See also David R. MacGregor, Fast Sailing Ships: Their design and construction, 1775–1875, Lymington: Nautical Publication Company, 1973. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How distance shaped Australia’s history, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966 is a good introduction to the function that enormous distances play in Australian history.

  For conditions of convicts on board ship see Bateson, pp. 58–82. For conditions on nineteenth-century ships in the Pacific area and the Australian run generally, see Captain George Bayly’s Journals [edited by Pamela Statham and Rica Erikson] in Life on the Ocean Wave.Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific. From the journals of Captain George Bayly 1824–1844, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1998, pp. 19–29. The English Catholic priest William Ullathorne also describes conditions on board passenger ships to Australia a decade after Pearce. Ullathorne made several trips to and from Australia in the 1830s. See his From Cabin Boy to Archbishop: The autobiography of Archbishop Ullathorne, London: Hollis and Carter, 1941.