‘A Government Jail Gang, Sydney, N.S. Wales’. Originally published in Views in New South Wales and Van Diemens Land, 1830.
The jury guilty found her for robbing a homeward bounder And paid her passage out to Botany Bay
‘Maggie May’, street ballad
A ‘disgraceful transaction’ took place at the Hawkesbury River town of Windsor in 1811. Ralph Malkin, transported in 1801, put a rope around his wife and led her down the street seeking a buyer. He found one. Thomas Quire stumped up 16 pounds on the spot, plus a few yards of cloth to be delivered later.
While the better classes of society were outraged at such a ‘gross violation of decency’, wife-selling was a custom practised throughout Britain since at least the sixteenth century. And not only by the common folk. The 2nd Duke of Chandos is said to have purchased his second wife around 1740 and many recorded cases of the custom involve tradesmen and skilled men as the purveyors of their spouses. While the practice was not legal, it was commonly believed to be so and there was often a reluctance by magistrates to prosecute cases.
By the time Ralph Malkin decided to offer his wife to the highest bidder in Windsor, the custom was increasingly frowned on by public opinion. The writer of the letter in which the event is recorded used words like ‘shameful’ and ‘contemptible’ to describe the seller and the buyer of Mrs Malkin.
But all was not as it might seem to contemporary or modern sensibilities. For a wife-selling to proceed, the woman had to agree to be sold. Research on this custom indicates that in quite a few cases the women were sold to men who were already their lovers. It seems that wife-selling was a form of folk divorce at a time when the average person could not afford such proceedings, or even access the legal means to achieve that state.
Prices paid for wives exchanged by this process varied from a high of 100 pounds down to 3 farthings. There are even cases where wives were given away free or for a glass of beer. The price was not as important as the fact that the sale took place in public, usually a market, fair or public house. This ensured the presence of plenty of witnesses to validate the transaction. Popular participation and approval was an important element of the custom. There are reports of magistrates seeking to stop a wife sale being driven away by the crowd.
An occasional reason for sale was that the wife simply tired of her husband, as in the case of a wife sold in Wenlock Market, Shropshire, in 1830. When her husband showed signs of cold feet at the last minute, she reportedly flipped her apron in his face and said ‘Let be yer rogue. I wull be sold. I wants a change’.
In the case of the Windsor event, Mrs Malkin (who is never named) was thought to be: ‘so devoid of the feelings which are so justly deemed the most valuable in her sex, agreed to the base traffic, and went off with the purchaser, significantly hinting that she had no doubt that her new possessor would make her a better husband than the wretch she thus parted from.’ Which was the long-winded nineteenth-century way of saying that she not only agreed to be sold but that she thought the new husband was a whole lot better than the old one.
While everyone involved in this transaction was seemingly perfectly happy with it, the local bench of magistrates investigated and determined that a breach of some law had taken place. And in any case, the three ‘base wretches’ involved quite readily admitted to their crime, if it was one. Ralph Malkin received fifty lashes and three months hard labour in irons. His wife—or ex-wife—was transported to the Coal River (Newcastle) for an indefinite period. There seems to be no record of any proceedings against Mrs Malkin’s purchaser.
Why were convicts secreting shirts, shoes and the odd dead cat in the walls and chimneys of colonial buildings?
This little-known folk practice has recently received some much-needed attention by researchers in Britain, America and Australia. The custom, which can also involve a variety of other everyday objects and implements, dates to the medieval era at least and there is also evidence that the Romans followed a similar practice during their occupation of Britain.
No official records document this seemingly odd activity but an ever-increasing number of finds suggests that it was once extremely common. To date, the largest Australian cache is in Tasmania. An early nineteenth-century house near Oatlands yielded thirty-eight boots and shoes concealed in voids and cavities. Other sites throughout Australia have harboured garments, religious items, animal bones, toys and mummified cats, as well as miscellaneous bottles, coins and cutlery. Even a few parasols have turned up.
The Moreton Bay Penal Station gave up its secret of a working boot when the commissariat building was being renovated in 1913. The remaining fragment suggests the wearer was possibly fifteen years old, or less, and was engaged in very hard labour. Other finds include convict shirts in Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks (now Sydney Living Museums) and Tasmania, as well as a convict jacket connected to Port Arthur.
The most widely accepted explanation for the careful placing of these everyday items is that they were concealed in buildings as protection from evil forces, for good luck and, as many of the items are associated with children, perhaps as a form of secret household memorial. While this may sound bizarre, in earlier eras it was widely believed that evil was somehow in the air and needed to be constantly warded off. The wearing of amulets and the casting of charms, spells and curses are old practices that reflect the same folk beliefs.
This magic, of course, was not peculiar to convicts. But convicts were mostly ordinary people whose opportunities to acquire book learning were usually non-existent or severely limited. In the void of the unexplainable and the feared, the ritual concealment of significant objects, frequently at the borders of buildings, may have been a way of protecting the inhabitants from whatever nastiness lurked outside, whether supernatural or real.
As well as the concealed objects, researchers have discovered magical symbols in old buildings of the convict era. These marks were traditionally made to avert evil, and may be scratched into stone or wood, usually around doors or windows. A common mark is the six-petalled hexafoil, or daisy wheel. One of these appears on the Norfolk Island gravestone of Michael Anderson, executed in 1834 for his part in the convict mutiny that year.
These practices have also been identified and researched in Britain and the United States. They were presumably taken from Britain to America and, later, to Australia by convicts and settlers who were English, Irish, Scots, Cornish and Welsh. They were never written down or apparently observed by the officials who were supposedly regulating the colonies, but they had powerful meanings for those who carried such venerable folk beliefs across the world to protect them in strange new lands.
In the English city of Chester one day in September 1825 ‘an elderly-looking woman’ was brought before a local magistrate and the town clerk to answer a few questions. In those days there were no social security welfare payments and those without other means of support had to apply to the parish for relief. The interview began with the woman being asked her name:
‘Well my name, your Honour’s, a very ugly name—it’s Kitty Gravy, (dropping a curtsey) I come from the Vale of Clwyd.’
Next, they wanted to know if the woman was married:
‘Married! O yes; I are be married very often; I have had four husbands, and the last he is in Liverpool Infirmary with a broken leg, and his name’s John Joachim Gravy; a very ugly name, isn’t it your Worship?’
What His Worship replied, if anything, was not recorded but Mrs Gravy went on to tell the panel that she had been married at Botany Bay. They thought she meant a place in Chester near the canal, opposite Queen Street.
‘Pooh, no: I mean Botany Bay—the real Botany Bay, 30 000 miles off, your Honour.’
‘And what took you there?’
‘Pon my word, they transported me for seven years for doing nothing—nothing at all; God knows what for, I can’t tell. I never stole anything in my life.’
Kitty then put her hand into her ‘sinister pocket’ and drew out some papers. They turned out to include what purported to be a certificate from the governor-general of New South Wales dated twenty years earlier. On the back was a description of the ‘fair complexion’ of a much younger Kitty. When the clerk read it out, Kitty, ‘looking very knowing, and with a shrug of her shoulders, exclaimed, “Aye, but it’s withered now”’.
Kitty went on to explain that Mr Gravy, a German, had been a free settler in New South Wales, living at Woolloomooloo. It was there that she had, presumably, met and married him.
All this time, Kitty ‘appeared to be in high glee’. So much so that she was rebuked for her levity by one of the aldermen. She replied:
‘Thank your Honour, (curtseying), I’m much obliged: I paid 100 pounds for my passage home, and everyone loves poor Kitty. I’m all fair yea and nay, your Honours.’
It was then suggested by one of the interviewers that Kitty was, in fact, living with a Frenchman in Brighton ‘but she repelled the charge indignantly’ and went on to catalogue the history of her various husbands:
‘My first husband was James Miller, and he was a Scotchman; Thomas Wilson was my next, and he was a Hollander in the Navy; my third husband John Grace, an Irishman, from the County of Wicklow; and my fourth was John Gravy, a German. So you see (said Mrs Kitty with all the naivety of an accomplished punster) that for my last two husbands I had Grease and Gravy!’
Of the four, Kitty reckoned the first had been ‘worth them all’. When asked when she had first married, she replied: ‘Eh! The Lord knows, it’s a long while ago.’ She told the panel that she had a daughter aged forty-six with six children, and it was eventually decided that Kitty Gravy must have been seventy-six years of age.
The innocent transport said she had arrived back in London two years earlier, where she had ‘promptly been robbed of 170 pounds. Her fingers were decked with rings, some silver’. Whether the parish interviewers decided that Kitty was a deserving case for the Poor Books (the papers in her ‘sinister pocket’ included a number of receipts for relief she had already received from other parishes), we do not know. Her practised arts of flattering and cajoling the system to satisfy her needs, real or contrived, were certainly on display that day in Chester. They must have served her well in the penal system of New South Wales.
It was early in December 1826 when Robert Newsham—described by the Sydney Gazette as ‘the spouting Government servant of a gentle man at Windsor, but who resides at a Curry-jong [Kurrajong] farm’—was charged for harbouring and encouraging one Catherine Murphy. He then aggravated the offence by denying that she was concealed in the house.
Newsham, something of a poet, addressed the court in mock-Shakespearian style, obviously not taking the charges very seriously:
May it please your Worships—thus I bow and plead
I heard a noise of sorrow at the wicket
Of our hospitable home, I listened!
That my affections were estrang’d from rigid
Duty, proudly I admit I paus’d awhile,
‘Tis Juliet’ said I. I trac’d, thro’ crevice,
With eager glance, her beauty dissolved was
All rectitude of thought! her gown thrown loosely
O’er her head and shoulders, screening a modest
Figure from the vulgar gaze of man: I blush
And own the rapture of my heart methought the
Lisping of her faultering tongue a poignard
Ent’ring my breast! so raised I my head, and
With a gentle touch of thumb and finger, the
Latch of door gave way ‘Gracious urbanity!’
Said Kitty Murphy: in she came. ‘Give me a
Drink of milk!’
Tempus fugit. Up came John Welsh,
And as Othello dark! but in his hand no
Dirk! his eye the dagger! Alas! my conscience,
Not my skin was pierc’d. When thus I said ‘Your all
Relenting wife has here reclin’d.’ ‘She has!’ A
Constable he sought; and Kitty Murphy fled
The anger of her lord, leaving Robertus
To himself alone. ‘This is the head and front
Of my offending.’ Inclin’d to pity one,
Who fled for succour, may I your pity find.
The grandiloquent Newsham was discharged with a stern warning ‘not to shelter the runagate wife of any man in future’.
But it seems that Catherine was also busy elsewhere in the area at that time:
John M’Namarra was detected in the brush wood upon Mr Howe’s farm at the Curry-jong, by a constable, when in search of Kitty Murphy. The constable conceived a familiarity had taken place which was improper, and therefore lodged the man in custody. The man pleaded he was on his master’s ground, and about his mister’s business, and that he could not be bound for a runaway trollop not coming upon the estate.
M’Namarra was given a rap over the knuckles and discharged. Finally, Catherine herself was brought into court:
Catharine Murphy in her torn way, brought up to account for repeated drunkenness and other bad habits. To look upon this woman, the impression would be in her favour; to read the depositions taken in the case, the uncontrovertible facts adduced, and then say ‘frailty thy name is woman!’ would be mild, but to say, Catharine thou art a disgrace to thy sex, would be speaking fact. She had not long been married to a man holding a ticket of leave, who may be said to be close fingered and industrious. By her drunken habits she had become a pest in the neighbourhood, and her misconduct tended also to injure the reputation of her husband.
Catherine Murphy was sentenced to six months in the third class at the Parramatta Female Factory. This was the class supposedly reserved for women who had committed serious crimes but was also used to punish those considered wayward or wanton. Catherine would have passed her time at the factory breaking rocks and possibly suffering solitary confinement and having her head shaved.
Tiny specks of blood stain a long lost quilt, now carefully treasured in the National Gallery of Australia. Many unknown hands stitched the quilt as they voyaged to Tasmania aboard the transport Rajah in 1841. Some, perhaps most, were not skilled with the needle but they managed to design, cut and sew almost 3000 separate scraps of material into a bright and beautiful handiwork of flowers, birds, lozenges and other shapes. At the lower border of the quilt, cross-stitched in fine silk yarn, is the inscription:
To the ladies of the convict ship committee, this quilt worked by the convicts of the ship Rajah during their voyage to Van Dieman’s [sic] Land is presented as a testimony of the gratitude with which they remember their exertions for their welfare while in England and during their passage and also as a proof that they have not neglected the ladies [sic] kind admonitions of being industrious. June 1841.
The ‘ladies of the convict ship committee’ were led by the English Quaker reformer, Elizabeth Fry. Shocked by the appalling conditions of women and children in London’s prisons, Elizabeth formed the forerunner of the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners in 1817. The women of this group provided convict women transported to Australia with: ‘sewing supplies which included tape, ten yards of fabric, four balls of white cotton sewing thread, a ball each of black, red and blue thread, black wool, twenty-four hanks of coloured thread, a thimble, one hundred needles, threads, pins, scissors and two pounds of patchwork pieces (or almost ten metres of fabric).’
Aboard the Rajah was young Miss Kezia Hayter, bound for Van Diemen’s Land at the recommendation of Elizabeth Fry to help Lady Franklin establish the Tasmanian Ladies’ Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners. It is thought that she encouraged the convicts to work on the quilt in accordance with Elizabeth Fry’s belief in the redeeming and practical value of needlework for otherwise idle hands.
That may be so, though quilts were made by convict women on other ships, including the Brother in 1823. If Miss Hayter was the direct inspiration and overseer of the quilting, it is a little odd that the name of the society she represented is not directly mentioned in the dedicatory inscription. Perhaps the women of the Rajah organised themselves when provided with the opportunity and the resources?
Whatever its exact origins, the completed work was handed to Lady Franklin after the Rajah docked at Hobart on 19 July 1841. Within four years it was sent back to Elizabeth Fry in England, though it is thought that she had died before she could see it. The Rajah quilt then disappeared from view. It was not rediscovered until Janet Rea, researching her Quilts of the British Isles, stumbled across the Rajah quilt in a Scottish attic in 1987. It was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 1989. The quilt is so fragile that it is only usually displayed once a year.
The Rajah quilt is not the only convict needlework to have survived. Sarah Litherland (Leatherland) was only about sixteen years of age when she was convicted of stealing in Chester and transported for seven years to Port Jackson where she finally arrived in 1801 aboard the Earl of Cornwallis. Her trade was listed as lacemaking. By 1806 she had her ticket-of-leave and the following year married James Wall in Parramatta. Wedded bliss, it seems, was short-lived. In 1809 James Wall published a warning in the Sydney Gazette against allowing his wife any credit in his name. Where Sarah was or who, if anyone, she was with is not known. All we have is her quilt made in 1811, the earliest known hexagonal quilt in Australia.
Not much that Owen Suffolk said or wrote about himself was very reliable. He had the possibly unique distinction of having been exiled twice, once from Britain when transported to Australia and the second time when he was banished from Australia.
A thief, conman, swindler, bigamist, bushranger and adventurer, Suffolk even faked his own death. He was a criminal conjuror, adept at deceit, illusion and eluding capture. These nefarious abilities landed him in a transport to Melbourne at the age of only seventeen in 1847. On arriving at Geelong he was granted a conditional pardon.
It was not long before Suffolk was in trouble again. In 1848 he was sentenced to five years hard labour in a road gang for horse stealing. He spent two years on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour where he endured, at different times, a total of seven weeks in solitary for relatively minor offences. Transferred to Pentridge Prison, Coburg at Christmas 1850, he escaped three months later using a forged document.
With two old accomplices, Suffolk robbed a mail coach, was caught, tried and sentenced to ten years, the first three in irons. Eventually moved to Melbourne Gaol, he became an informer and ‘trusty’ (a convict who guarded other prisoners), winning a ticket-of-leave after serving less than three years of the original sentence. Suffolk’s literary publications and eloquence apparently encouraged Chief Justice Sir William à Beckett to declare that he was ‘certainly no common criminal’. The chief justice presumably had something to do with the remarkable commutation of Suffolk’s original sentence.
Even more remarkable was Suffolk’s next move. He applied to join, and was accepted into, the police detective corps, working on the Victorian goldfields. His criminal investigation career was short-lived. Convicted of some forgery he had performed while in Melbourne Gaol, he was back inside by Christmas 1853. Again using his considerable writing talents, Suffolk petitioned the chief secretary so convincingly that he was granted remissions and he was out again on a ticket-of-leave in December 1857.
But, as ever, he was soon back to crime and was convicted of horse stealing in 1858 with a cumulative sentence of twelve years. He served less than nine of these years, mainly in Pentridge and on the hulk Sacramento. During this time he began writing his memoirs. He was given yet another ticket-of-leave in July 1866 and in September was aboard a ship bound for England with a free pardon.
Despite his crimes, and to some extent because of them, Owen Suffolk was a remarkable character. As well as educating himself from the proceeds of his youthful illicit activities, his experiences in many jails and long associations with the underworlds of London and the colonies gave him the ability to walk, talk and write on both sides of society. His autobiography, initially sold to the Australasian newspaper for 50 pounds, is full of racy information about thieves’ language, or ‘Cant’, street life and surviving in the underbelly of his time, as in one of his less flowery poems celebrating one of many releases from jail:
I’m out in the world once more,
And I mean to run the rig,
For I’ve learned from the prison lore
That the pauper fares worse than the prig.
I’ve shivered and starved in vain,
And been honest for months in rag,
So if I’m convicted again,
I think it won’t be on the vag.
That might have been the end of the story, but for Owen Suffolk’s deep criminality. Once back in England, the eloquent exile from Australia quickly married a wealthy widow, and not for love. In 1868 he was tried for stealing and obtaining money by false pretences. He pleaded guilty and his appeal to the court was that he had care of his brother’s nineteen-year-old daughter and her child. This time, though, Suffolk’s silver tongue failed. The chief justice did not mince his words:
Don’t try and impose on me. I know your career. You were married to a widow, obtained all her property, deserted her, pretended by a fake report inserted in a newspaper that you were drowned, went away with your brother’s child, who cannot therefore be your wife (the prisoner here interrupting said, ‘She is my wife, my lord.’) Then, said his lordship, if you did marry her, you have added bigamy to your other offences, and I sentence you to a term of 15 years penal servitude.
Suffolk went to prison and seems never to have been heard of again. Unless the odd account appearing in an Australian newspaper a few months after his last trial can be believed. According to this report, Suffolk engineered a boating accident involving his niece/wife and managed to fake his own drowning: ‘It was ultimately discovered that he escaped to America with his wife’s moneys, and the proceeds of the sale of his wife’s furniture, which he sold before he left England. By the latest advices he was enjoying himself in New York.’
If you were a convict, you might know how to crack this code:
I pulled down a fan and a roll of snow. I starred the glaze and snammed 16 redge yacks. My joiner stalled. I took them to a swag chovey bloak and got 6 finnips and a cooter for the yacks. A cross cove who had his regulars lowr, a fly grabbed him. I am afraid he will blow it. He has been lagged for beaker hunting. Was a mushroom faker, has been on the steel for snamming a wedge sneezer so I must hoop it. Tell swag chovey bloke to christen the yacks quick.
It translates as:
I stole from a shop door a waistcoat and a web of Irish linen. I broke the corner of a window and got 16 gold watches. My fancy girl stood close by and screened me from observation. I took them to a person who buys stolen property who gave me 6 five-pound notes and a sovereign for the watches. A fellow thief who shared the money with me is taken by a policeman. I am afraid he will turn informer. He has been transported for stealing poultry. He used to travel about the country mending umbrellas and has been in prison for stealing a silver snuffbox. As I must run away, tell the person who bought the watches to get the names altered as soon as possible.
This is the flash language. This exchange took place between two transportees in Western Australia some time in the late 1850s or early 1860s. Most of the words and terms are unrecognisable, though blow it, meaning to make a mess of something, is still with us. As well there are many other flash terms that passed into the general vocabulary of Australian folk speech, like gadding (usually padding) the hoof for going about barefoot or poorly dressed and prad for a horse, a term also heard in British fairground speech. Some surprisingly modern-sounding terms were also in use then, such as screw for copulation and well-hung to describe an impressive set of male genitalia.
The flash language was a form of the secret underworld language spoken by British criminals since at least the early seventeenth century. Often called ‘Cant’, it was spoken by those with professional criminal backgrounds who were bellowsed, or transported to New South Wales and later to Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia. It consisted of technical terms for the equipment, methods and targets of criminals, as well as the colloquial speech of the urban working classes.
The earliest record of flash speech in Australia was made by Watkin Tench, a captain in the marines who saw convict society at first-hand from its earliest days. He had very definite views on the flash or ‘Kiddy’ (after kid, the flash term for deceive or mislead, still playfully in use as ‘just kidding’ and similar uses) language spoken by many of the transportees. Tench tells us that it was often necessary to have an interpreter in court to translate the evidence of witnesses and accused who spoke in a language that ‘has many dialects. The sly dexterity of the pickpocket; the brutal ferocity of the footpad; the more elevated career of the highwayman; and the deadly purpose of the midnight ruffian, is each strictly appropriate in the terms which distinguish and characterize it’.
A number of Cant dictionaries were compiled by scholars and educated rakes. One of the most colourful was a man said to have been the only convict transported to New South Wales on three separate occasions. His name was James Hardy Vaux, a ne’er-do-well thief, forger, conman and bigamist.15 He was also an excellent writer whose autobiography is one of the earliest Australian literary works. In it Vaux tells of his adventurous, if mostly nefarious, life.
After a chequered early career that included an apprenticeship to a draper, office work and a spell in the navy, Vaux was transported for the first time in 1801. His skills got him clerical work but after forging the governor’s initials on a food order he was sent to a road gang. His way with words got him back in favour and he returned to England as tutor to the governor’s children and those of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, also returning home. But his sentence expired during the voyage and he was then forced to join the crew sailing the ship.
Back in England Vaux married a London prostitute, returned to crime and was sent back to Sydney in 1810 after a death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. After once again abusing the trust given him through official appointments, he was soon in trouble and was sent to Newcastle. Here, he compiled his famous dictionary of convict-speak. He tried to escape but was recaptured, flogged and sent back to Newcastle in 1814.
In 1818, Vaux married an Irish convict woman, Frances Sharkey, at Newcastle and by the following year he was back in Sydney working as a clerk. He received a conditional pardon in 1820, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1823 and bigamously married another Irish convict, Eleanor Batman, in 1827.
But the settled life was not for James Hardy Vaux. In 1829 he absconded and made his way to Ireland. He changed his name to James Young and under this alias was convicted of passing forged notes in 1830. This time he was transported for seven years. But he was so well known in Sydney that he was recognised on arrival and his original life sentence reinstated. He was then sent to Port Macquarie on the mid-north coast of New South Wales where he remained until 1837 when he returned to Sydney. Two years later he was charged with assaulting an eight- or nine-year-old girl and sentenced to two years imprisonment. Although Governor Gipps wished to have Vaux serve out his life sentence, he was released in 1841.
And that was the last known sighting of an extraordinary adventurer, criminal and social observer who first recorded the speech of convicts like himself. It would not be until the formation of official police forces in the eighteenth century that a more serious, practical interest in the flash language arose. The police, often recruited from different social groups than those they were to pursue, found the language of the underworld incomprehensible. The necessity to understand this ‘code’ led to intense collection and study of underworld slang and its codification into police publications and individual notebooks.
In the State Archives of New South Wales is a book kept by an anonymous Sydney policeman from 1841–45 titled ‘Registry of Flash Men’, a list of criminals known to the compiler and an indispensable tool of the detective’s trade, then as now. It included terms like the plural form flash mob—a criminal confederacy, which could also refer to a pimp. As it still did back in England, the term was also applied to dandified dressing. A hocus pocus man or one who practised leger de main prospered by humbugging or deceiving others, probably using tricks that were later adapted by magicians. Illegal spirits were sold on the sly and illegal goods were redistributed through a fence or fence master. Implements of the burglary trade were frequently mentioned, including skeleton keys, screws and the small iron bar known as a jemmy. Nicknames were frequent and colourful, including Scrammy Bill, Gypsy Cooper and Hopping Saul. One flash man was reportedly ‘doing the stallion to Mrs W’.
The Cant language included such terms as the already-mentioned lag, though this referred not only to a convict but also to the sentence received and the act of transportation. To be lagged meant being caught and convicted. A lagging was a prison sentence. An old lag was one who had served out his or her transportation and who might be either free or perhaps serving another. Ned Kelly was still using the term as part of everyday speech in the late 1870s when he referred to being ‘lagged innocent’ in his Jerilderie Letter, meaning being unjustly imprisoned.
Other flash terms noted in the colony by Vaux included: bash—to beat; blow the gaff—reveal a secret; dollop—a large quantity of anything; frisk—to search; school—a number of persons met together to gamble; and snitch—to betray. Quite a number of these very early convict terms are still part of Australian English, including turn it up, to cause or create a stink, and to be nuts on someone or something, while a put up affair has become a put up job. The terms swag, snow-dropper and bloke are derived from Shelta, the language of travellers. Some Cant words well-established in the underworld speech of late eighteenth-century England are also still in use, including blubber to cry, boose for drinking alcohol and boosy for drinking too much of it.
Many male and female convicts marked their bodies with tattoos. Unlike modern tattoo inks and machines, the markings were often pushed into their skins with needles using the black soot from lamps. Tattoos could simply register personal and family details, such as significant dates of trials or embarking on a transport, but they often also told a deeper story.
Twenty-one-year-old groom Laban Stone married Sarah Burgess in 1828. They had a son named John before Laban was convicted of ‘robbing a person’ and transported aboard the Eleanor in 1831. On Laban’s left arm were the initials: LS and SS, followed by a sun, the initials JS, a tree, then the date 1831 and finally a heart. The message of connection, family and constancy was clearly expressed in these few signs, with the sun being a phonetic equivalent for ‘son’, the tree standing for strength and endurance, and the heart, of course, for love.
Some tattoos were simply obscene. Others might be heavily symbolic. A butcher from Cork named Denis Barrett sported Masonic emblems, a harp and the words ‘Erin Go Bragh’ (Ireland forever) on his left arm, suggesting strong nationalist belief. An anchor was a frequent symbol and not necessarily connected with sailors. An anchor by itself meant hope and commitment. A man carrying an anchor meant that the bearer was carrying hope, while a man near an upside-down anchor would be someone who had lost hope. An anchor and a crucifix could signify a hope for salvation. Many symbols had more or less common meanings and so could be assembled in a kind of crude code to form meaningful statements.
Popular symbols that made up this more or less secret language included hearts, fish, mermaids, bugles, ships, flags, darts, crowns, rings and crosses. One symbol that appeared frequently on convict skins was a flowerpot. What it might be meant to convey is not known, unless it was meant to convey the idea of confinement, a plant trapped in a pot struggling towards the sun, a crude allegory for the life of a convict?
Tattoos also made it easy for the authorities to identify convicts and careful records were made of the markings that appeared on individuals when they arrived in jail, boarded a transport or stepped ashore. It was not unusual for convicts without previous tattoos to be tattooed aboard ship on their way to exile. When a convict absconded, the authorities simply went to their register and advertised the tattoos carried by their quarry. A female escapee from Launceston was easily described by a distinctive set of markings, including the anchor, heart and darts on her right arm, together with the letters ‘TRHCDAWT’. On her left arm appeared: ‘JJ’, a heart with dart, ‘I love John Johnson’ and ‘JBWH’.
Convicts sometimes wore tattoos with clandestine or obscure meaning. Ann Corbett carried on her right arm the letters ‘MWW HMDBDSDSDEDBDLDSDR’. It is thought that lines as lengthy as these might be a cypher for biblical or political messages. Only those in the know would understand their import. The more personal and perhaps subversive the meaning of the tattoo, the more likely it was to be on a part of the body not usually visible. Some male convicts were tattooed on their penis.
A system of dots was also in use. In 1839, Elizabeth Williams was recorded as having five blue dots on the back of her hand, arranged as the four corners of a square with the fifth dot in the centre. Historians are not sure of the meaning of this or other arrangements of dots, but as it usually appeared on a visible part of the body, it was presumably meant to communicate a meaning. It is thought that the five dots represent the four corners of a cell, with the convict imprisoned in the centre. This arrangement was still being seen in the 1870s on convicts transported to Western Australia.
Whatever the motivations of convicts to mark their skin with painful images, messages and codes, the practice was significant for them, personally and within the convict world. Tattoos were a way to defy a system that literally owned their bodies for the term of their confinement and even after. It was common practice for executed felons to be examined for biological signs of criminality, including head size and shape, as well as any other bodily indications of nefarious propensity. Heads might be removed from bodies and death masks made in pursuit of this pseudo-science known as ‘phrenology’. Only after these indignities would the body be released for burial and then often in unhallowed and unmarked ground.
Tempting drunken sailors to sin and robbing them before or after the promised sexual favours was a steady source of income for prostitutes. It was a method employed in every sailortown and usually ended up with no consequences for the woman, who was long gone by the time the matelot woke up and found his pockets empty. But sometimes the woman was unlucky, like the heroine of this mildly ribald ballad. Its rollicking chorus has made it a favourite in one version or another, possibly since the 1830s. This one hails from the English seaport town of Liverpool and is much less bawdy than many versions sung at sea.
Oh come along all you sailor boys and listen to my plea
And when I am finished you’ll agree
I was a goddamned fool in the port of Liverpool
The first time that I came home from sea.
We was paid off at The Hove from a port called Sydney Cove
And two pound ten a month was all my pay
Oh I started drinking gin and was neatly taken in
By a little girl they all called Maggie May.
Chorus
Oh Maggie, Maggie May they have taken you away
To slave upon that cold Van Diemen shore
Oh you robbed so many sailors and dosed so many whalers
You’ll never cruise down Lime Street any more
’Twas a damned unlucky day when I first met Maggie May
She was cruising up and down old Canning Place
Oh she had a figure fine as a warship of the line
And me being a sailor I gave chase.
In the morning when I woke stiff and sore and stoney broke
No trousers, coat, or waistcoat could I find
The landlady said ‘Sir I can tell you where they are
They’ll be down in Stanley’s hock-shop number nine’.
To the bobby on his beat at the corner of the street
To him I went to him I told my tale
He asked me as if in doubt ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’
But agreed the lady ought to be in jail.
To the hock-shop I did go but no trousers there I spied
So the bobbies came and took the girl away
The jury guilty found her for robbing a homeward bounder
And paid her passage out to Botany Bay.