Damned Whores and God's Police

by Anne Summers

  The most dramatic revolt occurred at the Parramatta Factory in October 1827 when a riot and mass escapade took place. The riot was precipitated by the women in the third class who complained that they were being starved and that their ration of tea and sugar had been taken away. At the time there were over 200 women in the third class and a larger number than usual in the first class as more women were being transported than could be absorbed into employment. One newspaper described what happened:

  Several of the more refractory spirits were … taken from among the gentler ones, and clapped in cooling cells under lock and key. The factory continued in a state of agitation until Saturday morning when the storm raged fiercer than before. The ladies, by some means, got possession of tools, with which they belaboured most unmercifully the hinges and panels of one of the gates, till it left an opening, through which, in a joint and corporate body, all rushed, and dispersing through the town, proceeded to beat up the bakers’ and the butchers’ quarters.65

  Only three or four women actually escaped. Most submitted to capture once they had obtained food. Their actions seemed to have been designed to protest about conditions at the factory and they had no desire to escape – where could they go? Another account of the riot is significant for it shows how the women stood up to the soldiers who were sent in to quell them and how on their recapture they demonstrated a solidarity with each other to protect the ring-leaders from being singled out for punishment:

  A Captain, a Lieutenant, two serjeants, and about forty rank and file, were in immediate requisition by the Magistrates, and were seen flying in all directions with fixed bayonets, for the purpose of securing the fugitives, and staying the mutiny; but so violent were the Amazonian banditti, that nothing less was expected than that the soldiers would be obliged to commence firing on them. After a little time, however, numbers of those who had broke loose were secured, and conducted back to the old quarters under a military escort, shouting as they went along, and carrying with them their aprons loaded with bread and meat, for which, after the manner of a conquering army, they had laid the inhabitants of Parramatta and its vicinity under contribution. On their arrival at the Factory, Major Lockyer, the Superintendent of Police, at Parramatta, directed the ring-leaders be selected and confined in the cells, but so determined were the rioters, that, though opposed by a military force, they succeeded in rescuing their companions, declaring, that if one suffered, all should suffer.66

  In 1847 the need for the Parramatta Factory ceased to exist. No convicts had been sent to New South Wales for seven years and the women still remaining at the factory were described by the governor as ‘the dregs of the convict system’.67 The following year the factory became the Convict, Lunatic and Invalid Establishment at Parramatta. Most of the women had been discharged or given tickets of leave, and the place was ‘thus cleared except for those women who were invalids and lunatics’.68 Two years later its name was changed to the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum and in 1852 it began to receive male patients as well. In 1855 the records showed it had 187 male and 92 female patients.69

  With the beginnings of mass immigration to the colonies and the development of an alternative ideology about the function of women, the enforced whoredom of women could no longer be so blatantly maintained. It was replaced by the more subtle controls of the institutions of marriage and motherhood.

  Transportation to Australia ceased in 1852 and by that time the Damned Whore stereotype was no longer dominant, even though it persisted as a label for the demi-mondaine who became outcasts, forgotten or ignored by respectable society. The ‘invalids and lunatics’ who remained at Parramatta probably died there since the administration of lunacy in New South Wales was such that although measures to commit people were devised, no provision was made for discharge procedures.70 Many of these convicts were probably refractory women who had had to endure solitary confinement as this was known to send many women – more so than men – permanently insane.71 In 1855 the female population was still outnumbered by males by more than two to one, so there was a disproportionately high number of women confined to the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum. These women were indeed the dregs of what by now was a prosperous respectable society, which had no wish to be reminded of its recent history during which female prostitutes had helped lay the foundations of that prosperity.

  The female convicts were not as evil and as depraved as they were painted. In Tasmania, where the ‘worst’ women were sent, only 4 per cent were convicted for crimes committed after their arrival whereas 10 per cent of the men were.72 A statistical study of a sample of women sent to Tasmania found that 28.5 per cent were not normally criminal before transportation, that is, they had committed only one offence which had led to their being sentenced, that 37.5 per cent were occasionally criminal, that is, had a small number of convictions, while only the remaining third could be classed as habitual criminals.73 It needs to be pointed out that what was called criminal then would be classified as a misdemeanour today. By far the most common crimes were larceny and theft of wearing apparel.74

  It is difficult to ascertain how many had been prostitutes before coming to Australia: Robson calculates that about one-fifth had engaged in full- or part-time prostitution.75 So the wholesale adoption of whoredom on coming to Australia has to be explained in terms of the social climate of this country and the expectations held of women. It was deemed necessary by both the local and the British authorities to have a supply of whores to keep the men, both convict and free, quiescent. The whore stereotype was devised as a calculated sexist means of social control and then, to absolve those who benefited from it from having to admit to their actions, characterised as being the fault of the women who were damned by it.

  *The Female Factory will be described in more detail later in this chapter.

  *Although contemporary accounts described all migrants to Australia as emigrants, this work will employ the modern distinction of describing arriving or settled migrants as immigrants and will use the term emigrant only to designate a prospective migrant from England (or whatever country).

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘God’s Police’

  If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. If the paternal Government wish to entitle itself to that honoured appellation, it must look to the materials it may send as a nucleus for the formation of a good and great people. For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called ‘God’s police’ – wives and little children – good and virtuous women.

  Caroline Chisholm, Emigration and TransportationRelatively Considered, 1847

  Caroline Chisholm was to set a pattern for women who followed her into public life in Australia. Her work was philanthropic, but practical; it opened up a new field which official policy had neglected; it led to changes in both legislation and administrative policy; it was directed to ensuring public and private morality and ensuring a more stable foundation for family life; and it did a great deal to offset the rough masculinity of colonial society. All this, moreover, was achieved without a head-on clash with Victorian conventions, and without raising any issue of principle about women’s rights.

  Norman Mackenzie, Women in Australia, 1962

  Our business being to colonize the country, there was only one way to do it – by spreading over it all the associations and connections of family life.

  Henry Parkes, NSW Legislative Assembly, 14 August 1866

  As Australia evolved from penal colony to respectable society, those influencing and determining the change wanted women to be wives, not whores. They wanted to alter the social conditions that had forced women to be whores, and to eradicate the evidence of the colony’s far from illustrious recent past. This was not possible while the colony was regarded
by the British Government as a continental jail and by the wealthy pastoralists as a giant grazing pasture. But once it became clear that Australia was going to be able to attract and absorb free settlers and to cast off its penal function, new ideas about what kind of society could develop became important. The 1840s saw the first wave of Australian nationalism. Transportation to the mainland ceased, a distinctive land policy that had important enduring effects on the country’s future social and economic patterns was implemented, and the first stage of self- government was introduced. A new nation was beginning to emerge and its citizens were anxious to determine its social, economic and political perimeters as well as their place within it.

  It was as part of this process that the first moves to redefine the position of women in the nascent nation were made. This was confirmation of the trend established in penal colony days: women’s status and their allotted functions were always to be tied to national needs. Women in Australia have never been treated as individuals able to move more or less freely within those boundaries that all societies erect to ensure that their citizens ultimately conform to what are defined as social necessities. Men in Australia, while being repressed in the way that all societies repress their citizens, have almost always had a degree of choice about which repressive route they would follow: their individuality has been recognised. Women have been treated as a group – a group defined purely on grounds of gender – and rarely have had more than a single vocation imposed upon them.

  It was inevitable that the social engineers of Australian society would look to England rather than to another colony, or former colony like the US, for the values they wished to implant. The great majority of the immigrants who peopled Australia in this nation-building era came from the British Isles, most of them from England, and the greater proportion of settlers in Australia were of British descent. However much they aspired to a new way of life or wanted to declare their political and economic independence from Britain, they retained links with the parent nation which were founded as much in cultural obsequiousness as in simple nostalgia or the desire to maintain contact with relatives. The English immigrants came to Australia convinced that the British political and economic system deserved emulation; what they also brought with them was the hope that this system would work more successfully for them in the new land than it had, for the majority of them, in the old.

  Virtually all previous writers on immigration to Australia have devoted their attention to economic development, especially land use, or to the political ideas that the immigrants reputedly brought with them. In arguing against the theory usually culled from this approach – that radical labour politics originated from these immigrants – Humphrey McQueen cites one radical newspaper’s views of the aspirations of the immigrant of the late 1840s: ‘The mechanic who emigrates to this colony has the same object as the capitalist. Ask anyone what he came to the colony for, and his answer will be: to better his condition’.1 Rather than bringing in his baggage the predisposition to establish a socialist Utopia, the immigrant came hoping to imitate the bourgeois class whose monopoly of the wealth in England had forced him to leave his native land. What enticed him, argues McQueen, was ‘the prospect of establishing, not a classless society, but a one-class society, and that one class would be petty-bourgeois in orientation. Even those who failed were subject to the attitudes of those who succeeded’.2 But like those he is attacking, McQueen’s sights are still pinned to the labouring activities of men, and he defines the immigrants’ ambitions narrowly, restricting them to their political and economic aspirations and attainments. The only departures from this tradition have been those historians who have traced the influence of religious ideas on Australia’s social and political development.

  CMH Clark, for example, has drawn attention to the way in which Anglican ministers were regarded as moral policemen during the penal period and how their religion had ‘an obvious social usefulness in a convict society, for it preached in favour of subordination and against drunkenness, whoring and gambling’.3 Similarly, it has been pointed out that when, in 1820, the first Roman Catholic chaplains officially tolerated by the authorities were allowed to pursue their pastoral duties, it was in the belief that Catholics would thus be more easily controlled. Governor Macquarie hoped that the Blessed Sacrament would expel forever the spectre of the 1804 Castle Hill rebellion. Fear of Irish Catholic sedition and subversion prompted the erosion of the Anglican hegemony. These motives were made clear by the fact that, whereas Protestant chaplains were paid direct from the Treasury, the salaries of the priests came from the Police Fund.4 But to attribute the changes that occurred in the socioeconomic and authority structures solely, or even mainly, to the labouring or political activities of men and the moral exhortations of ministers of religion ignores huge tracts of human intention and experience. It entails totally excluding from consideration one group who by now comprised nearly 25 per cent of the population. In these accounts, women assume an ethereal existence and are apparently subsumed within the activities of men. But even the accounts of the men are inadequate. What were these men working for? How did they actually see their changed environment and status? How did a few ministers succeed in taming what most commentators concurred was an ubiquitously amoral and rebellious populace? The historians of labour and religion have myopically concentrated overmuch on the public lives of men and have not made the obvious connections between these and family developments in colonial Australia. Such a recognition would have enabled them to perceive some of the motives influencing these men and to recognise the new functions and status women were starting to assume.

  Many of the proponents of the ‘Whig interpretation’ of Australian history have relied very heavily on the fragment thesis of Louis Hartz. In his attempt to explain the genesis and development of the governing ideologies of new societies, Hartz proposes that the new society be viewed as a fragment of the parent nation, the fragment encapsulating the dominant political and social ideologies prevalent at the time of the founding of the new society.5 Thus he sees the US as a fragment of pre-capitalist mercantile England, whereas Latin America and French Canada, founded earlier, are fragments of the feudal period. What is important about the fragment is that although it imports the dominant ideology, this is not accompanied by either the forces that gave rise to it or those that subsequently arose to counter it; the history of the parent nation and the new society thus will differ even if at one point in chronological time they were virtually identical. The new society will exhibit in a pure, crystallised form some of the ideas plucked from the mass of conflicting ideologies fighting for hegemony in the parent nation.

  Hartz and his followers see Australia as a fragment of the radical democracy of Cobbett and the Chartists, as a society that incorporated within its origins ‘the proletarian spirit which came out of the early convict establishment and the subsequent waves of radical migration, both British and Continental, which characterized Australian development’.6 They postulate the fragment in almost pure political form, forgetting that this may not match the perceptions of the ordinary people they champion. Yet if the fragment thesis is applied to social ideas, it appears more fruitful, and is a more plausible representation of the actual motives impelling mass migration to Australia. In particular it can be used to view the introduction, unfolding and subsequent entrenchment in Australian society of the idea that the bourgeois family should be the basic unit of social organisation, that it was the most satisfactory institution yet devised for organising reproduction, rearing children, controlling sexuality and affording maximum opportunities both for individual self-realisation and conjugal happiness. Hartz notes that the social ideas of the Old World invariably influence each other and merge together in some kind of compromise conflation

  because [the Old World] locks them together in a seething whole, it gives none of [these social ideas] the freedom to evolve. The fragments provide that freedom. By extricating the European ideologies from the European battle, by
cutting short the process of renewal which keeps that battle going, they permit precisely that unfolding of potentialities which the Old World denies.7

  Australia, it can be argued, became the fragment within which the bourgeois ideal of ‘the family’ was able to flourish, and to be adopted by all classes long before it would have been possible for them had they remained in Britain. Australia became the place where, from the late 1840s onwards, thousands of immigrants were able to turn their aspirations of emulating middle-class lifestyles into some kind of reality. The fragment that broke away from the Old World was something simpler, more concrete and infinitely more portable than the complex notions of radical democracy and unionism. Such views could be carried only by a politically aware minority, they would have to be imposed on a largely disinterested population, and a protracted struggle with an entrenched ruling class would be necessary before a propaganda process could even begin. By contrast, the idea that the bourgeois family was the ideal way for men and women to live and reproduce was shared by ruling class and immigrants alike. It was one of the bases on which immigration agents in England sought to select prospective settlers: married couples and young people of marriageable age were given priority for assisted passages. And it was an idea that did not require a lengthy process of induction or preparation. The Australian economy was already particularly receptive: it had few-labour intensive manufacturing industries to require the labour of women, and boom conditions ensured that men were paid wages high enough to support a whole family in a degree of comfort only dreamed of in England.

  But although conditions in Australia were potentially receptive to establishing the bourgeois family, during the early period of mass migration there were several obstacles lying between the immigrants’ aspirations and their fulfilment. They were hampered by the chaotic arrangements of the early emigration schemes, and the depression of the early 1840s proved to be a temporary setback, but foremost among the retarding forces was the entrenched attitude to women lingering on from transportation days.