Flogging prisoners, Tasmania. Pencil drawing from the 1850s by James Reid Scott, an explorer and politician who was part of a committee tasked with inquiring into Port Arthur and which recommended its closure and the redistribution of prisoners to other sites.
Excessive tyranny each day prevails
‘The Convict’s Lament’, c. 1830
When transportation to the American colonies ceased after the War of Independence, British jails soon overflowed with prisoners. This situation rapidly created a new form of penal horror.
To ease the pressure on prisons, the government allowed old ships to be anchored in the River Thames (and at Portsmouth, Plymouth and elsewhere) to hold prisoners awaiting banishment across the seas. These ‘hulks’ were supposed to be a stop-gap measure, but like many temporary arrangements they became permanent. Many prisoners would endure years aboard the rotting hulks, doing hard labour on the docks and in the naval arsenals, until they were finally transported.
The Dunkirk hulk moored at Plymouth was notorious even before the First Fleet set sail. Prisoners were sometimes without any clothing and in 1784 the abuse of the female convicts by the marine guards led to a ‘Code of Orders’ that was supposed to protect the women. Mary Bryant, later an almost successful escapee from Port Jackson, was held on the Dunkirk before sailing with the First Fleet. She became pregnant on the hulk.
Another infamous hulk was the Leviathan, moored at Portsmouth in the 1820s. She had seen better days when convict James Tucker (alias Rosenberg) was held there in 1826:
This vessel was an ancient ’74 [1774] which, after a gallant career in carrying the flag of England over the wide oceans of the navigable world, had come at last to be used for the humiliating service of housing convicts awaiting transportation over those seas. She was stripped and denuded of all that makes for a ship’s vanity. Two masts remained to serve as clothes props, and on her deck stood a landward conceived shed which seemed to deride the shreds of dignity which even a hulk retains.
Conditions aboard the Leviathan were better for the convicts, but were designed to strip them of whatever dignity they retained and subdue them into the system. When taken aboard, the prisoners were paraded and mustered on the quarter-deck:
Their prison irons were then removed and handed over to the jail authorities, who departed as the convicts were taken to the forecastle. There every man was forced to strip and take a thorough bath, after which each was handed out an outfit consisting of coarse grey jacket, waistcoat and trousers, a round-crowned, broad-brimmed felt hat, and a pair of heavily nailed shoes. The hulk’s barber then got to work shaving and cropping the polls of every mother’s son.
Fettered and shaven prisoners were then marched below ‘where they were greeted with roars of ironic welcome from the convicts already incarcerated there’. The lower deck was a prison of wooden cells, each one holding between fifteen and twenty convicts.
Edward Lilburn, a pipe-maker from Lincoln, described his experience of the Woolwich hulks around 1840:
I was led to think there was something dreadful in the punishment I had to undergo, but my heart sank within me on my arrival here, for almost the first thing I saw was a gang of my fellow unfortunates, chained together working like horses. I was completely horror-struck, but every hour serves now to increase my misery; I was taken to the Blacksmith and had my irons, the badge of infamy and degradation rivetted upon me, my name being registered and my person described in the books of the ship; I was taken to my berth, and here new sufferings presented themselves, as the great arrival of convicts had crowded the ship so much, that three of us have but one bed, and this the oldest prisoner claims as his own; our berth is so small, we have no room to lie at length, thus I passed a wretched, a half sleepless night; at the dawn of day we have a wretched breakfast of skilley, in which I cannot partake, and though suffering dreadfully from hunger I subsist wholly on my dinner, at present live on one meal a day!!
Lilburn had the cheek to complain but was told that he was ‘brought here for punishment and that I must submit to my fate’. He finished with a warning:
Whether I speak of my present situation in reference to daily labour, daily food, or the rigorous severity of the system under which I suffer, I can say, if there is a Hell on earth, it is a convict-ship. Let every inhabitant of the City and County of Lincoln know the Horrors of Transportation, that they may keep in the path of virtue, and happily avoid a life like mine of indescribable misery.
After 1844 convicts were transported directly from the prisons where they were held rather than being sent first to the hulks. But the old ships still operated as jails. By the time the journalists and social reformers Stephen Mayhew and John Binny visited the Thames hulks in the early 1860s, public outcry against the conditions and horrors of the hulks as described by Lilburn and others had already brought about reforms to the system, allegedly at least. Mayhew described conditions aboard the hospital ship Unité just a few years earlier in 1849:
The great majority of the patients were infested with vermin; and their persons, in many instances, particularly their feet, begrimed with dirt. No regular supply of body-linen had been issued; so much so, that many men had been five weeks without a change; and all record had been lost of the time when the blankets had been washed; and the number of sheets was so insufficient, that the expedient had been resorted to of only a single sheet at a time, to save appearances. Neither towels nor combs were provided for the prisoners’ use, and the unwholesome odour from the imperfect and neglected state of the water-closets was almost insupportable. On the admission of new cases into the hospital, patients were directed to leave their beds and go into hammocks, and the new cases were turned into the vacated beds, without changing the sheets.
Mayhew and Binny interviewed one of the warders who served under the previous ‘hulk regime’ and reported, ‘He well remembers seeing the shirts of the prisoners, when hung out upon the rigging, so black with vermin that the linen positively appeared to have been sprinkled over with pepper’. By the time this survey was conducted, there was regular medical treatment available on the hulks, a lending library and education for the man who could not read or barely so. The food provided had also improved dramatically, at least according to the regulations:
We now followed the chief warder below, to see the men at breakfast. ‘Are the messes all right?’ he called out as he reached the wards.
‘Keep silence there! keep silence!’ shouted the officer on duty.
The men were all ranged at their tables with a tin can full of cocoa before them, and a piece of dry bread beside them, the messmen having just poured out the cocoa from the huge tin vessel in which he received it from the cooks; and the men then proceed to eat their breakfast in silence, the munching of the dry bread by the hundreds of jaws being the only sound heard.
Each prisoner received a breakfast of 12 ounces of bread and a pint of cocoa. For dinner they were allowed 6 ounces of meat, 1 pound of potatoes and 9 ounces of bread; for supper, 1 pint of gruel with 6 ounces of bread. Wednesdays, Mondays, and Fridays were ‘Soup Days’, when the dinner was 1 pint of soup, 5 ounces of meat, 1 pound of potatoes, and 9 ounces of bread.
For punishment, the luckless convict was reduced to 1 pound of bread and water each day. Those on the sick list were fed 1 pint of gruel and 9 ounces of bread for breakfast, dinner and supper. But an enhanced diet was given to the very sick, as the master of the hospital told the journalists:
The man so bad, up-stairs, has 2 eggs, 2 pints of arrowroot and milk, 12 ounces of bread, 1 ounce of butter, 6 ounces of wine, 1 ounce of brandy, 2 oranges, and a sago pudding daily. Another man here is on half a sheep’s head, 1 pint of arrowroot and milk, 4 ounces of bread, 1 ounce of butter, 1 pint extra of tea, and 2 ounces of wine daily.
The trades and occupations of convicts in the 1850s included carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, sawyers, coopers, rope makers, bookbinders, shoemakers, tailors, washers and cooks, even the occasional doctor. Convicts received ‘gratuities’ for the quality of their work and general conduct. They wore badges which indicated their duration of sentence, period in the hulks and levels of good or bad behaviour, updated monthly, the details entered into the ‘character book’ of each hulk.
Mayhew also described the work performed by those whose labour was now at the control of the state:
The work of the hulk convicts is chiefly labourers’ work, such as loading and unloading vessels, moving timber and other materials, and stores, cleaning out ships, &c., at the dockyard; whilst at the royal arsenal the prisoners are employed at jobs of a similar description, with the addition of cleaning guns and shot, and excavating ground for the engineer department.
Mayhew saw the working parties in the dockyards:
Only the strongest men are selected for the coal-gang, invalids being put to stone-breaking. In the dockyard there are still military sentries attached to each gang of prisoners. We glanced at the parties working, amid the confusion of the dockyard, carrying coals, near the gigantic ribs of a skeleton ship, stacking timber, or drawing carts, like beasts of burden. Now we came upon a labouring party, near a freshly pitched gun-boat, deserted by the free labourers, who had struck for wages, and saw the well-known prison brown of the men carrying timber from the saw-mills. Here the officer called—as at the arsenal—‘All right, sir!’ Then there were parties testing chain cables, amid the most deafening hammering. It is hard, very hard, labour the men are performing.
Most closely regulated of all was convict time. From the moment of waking—5.30 a.m. in summer, half an hour later in winter—the prisoners of the hulks ate, worked, washed and prayed to a strict timetable. All were in their beds or hammocks at 9 p.m.
This strictly regulated world of servitude, obedience and hard labour was theoretically replicated in Western Australia, by then the only colony taking Britain’s transported convicts. But the reality of frontier servitude had always been very different.
At Port Arthur even the animals guarding the convicts were in chains. Located on the Tasman Peninsula, the narrow isthmus known as Eaglehawk Neck was the only means of land access and from 1832 was guarded by a detachment of military guards and a pack of up to eighteen dogs. The animals were housed in wooden barrels or small huts and kept chained under the care of a convict handler.
The artist and author Harden S. Melville described the beasts in the late 1830s: ‘There were the black, the white, the brindle, the grey and the grisly, the rough and smooth, the crop-eared and lop-eared, the gaunt and the grim. Every four-footed black-fanged individual among them would have taken first prize in his own class for ugliness and ferocity at any show.’
Twenty years later the commandant, James Boyd, noted, ‘Many of them have not been off the chain for years and are consequently very savage.’
This ‘dogline’, as the network of guard posts, lights, dogs and semaphore stations was known, was part of a broader security and signalling system connecting the Port Arthur establishment with Hobart. The messaging stations were tall land-bound masts with moveable arms that could send messages by sight quite efficiently with the use of an elaborate code book for reading the position of the arms. If it was dark or cloudy, warnings that an escape was in progress were made by firing two musket shots in rapid succession. The arrangement worked very well, most of the time. Its existence, combined with the belief fostered by the authorities that the surrounding waters were full of sharks, deterred all but the most desperate and resourceful escapees. The annals of Port Arthur are full of stories about escape attempts that ended in death or recapture and flogging.
In 1859 fourteen prisoners made a rush for liberty through the tower entry. It was a cloudy evening and the semaphore could not be used, so a written note was rushed by a runner up to Eaglehawk Neck. Most of the escapees were soon recaptured. Another fabled attempt was made by a man named Billy Hunt who wriggled inside a kangaroo skin and tried to hop to freedom. The guards, eager for a kangaroo stew, began taking pot shots and he was forced to reveal himself.
But there were some successes. The most celebrated was that of Martin Cash, Lawrence Kavanagh and George Jones. Cash, the longest lived and most celebrated of the Van Diemen’s Land bushrangers, and his accomplices encountered the dogline in 1842 but decided to try a different way:
At the dusk of the evening we came in sight of Eagle Hawk Neck, when we could see the line literally swarming with constables and prisoners. I here enjoined my mates to preserve the strictest silence, observing that one false move might frustrate what we had already achieved, and pointed to the place we should cross. We took a circuitous route through the scrub until we arrived at a spot where we could scan the line for about a mile on either side. We lay here for the next three hours, and having made a fair division of the bread which remained, trusted that it would be the last we should ever eat on Tasman’s Peninsula. On finishing our temperate meal, we started on the forlorn hope, moving as silently as possible, as the slightest noise might bring half-a-dozen constables about our ears. The most perilous part of the adventure was in crossing the road, where constables might be lying in ambush in the scrub which lined the opposite side and up to the water edge.
They reached the water, then silently followed each other into the ocean:
It was then blowing fresh, and the night being very dark, I lost sight of my mates; on getting to the centre, the waves broke clean over me, at the same time carrying away my clothes, which I had fastened in a bundle on my head, and thinking it useless to try and recover it, owing to the darkness of the night, I continued my course. As I could neither hear or see my companions, the horrible idea occurred to me that they had been eaten by the sharks, a similar circumstance having previously taken place about a mile lower down the gut, I being the first who ever attempted to cross so convenient to the ‘Neck.’ I by-and-by touched the bottom, and remained for some time standing, expecting to hear or see my mates. I had not remained more than five minutes, however, when I could distinctly hear them conversing, and apparently coming to where I stood. Jones now said to Kavanagh, ‘Martin’s drowned’, on hearing which I sprang on to the bank, and observed that I was worth half-a-dozen people in that situation. We were obliged to indulge in a laugh when we found that we were all situated alike with regard to clothing, as my mates as well as myself had lost theirs on the passage.
This escape around the dogline made Cash a hero among the convicts. He and his companions proved that it was possible to get free of the supposedly inescapable prison. When Port Arthur was closed in the late 1870s, so was the dogline. It would be nice to think that the dogs were then freed from their chains.
The traditional picture we have of convict garb is of broad arrows printed on a nondescript grey sack. The arrow was certainly used on convict uniforms but there were many variations, some of them quite odd.
At first, the lack of supplies in the colony that would become Sydney meant that convicts dressed in whatever they could find, augmented if they were quick, with a set of basic work clothes known as ‘slops’. By Macquarie’s term of governorship, extra trousers were distributed for those relatively few convicts attending church to appear respectable. In 1819, newly landed male convicts received ‘a suit consisting of a coarse woollen jacket and waistcoat of yellow or grey cloth, a pair of Duck [canvas] or cloth trousers, a pair of worsted stockings, a pair of shoes, two cotton or linen shirts, a neck handkerchief and a woollen cap’.
The cabbage tree hat was the favoured headgear. It was quickly and cheaply made by those with the skills and was comfortable to wear, protecting heads and faces from the harsh sunlight. These locally produced items were preferred to the official issue models, which were uncomfortable and unsuitable for the climate.
Re-offending New South Wales convicts were punished by being made to wear parti-coloured suits, one side black or grey and the other side yellow, usually with broad arrows on the trousers. They were known as ‘canary men’, or ‘canaries’, the absurdity of their appearance intended to add some public shaming to their other punishment.
A similar striking garb known as a ‘magpie’ was worn by Van Diemen’s Land male convicts. The outside seam of the trousers was held together by twelve buttons to allow them to be pulled on over chains. According to one recollection, from convict W. Gates, ‘The suits were all of a size, or with but a slight variation, and were distributed to us as we stood in rank, without regard to their fitting our person. The consequence was, we got all sorts of fits’.
Even clothing could provide an opportunity for some convict resistance. When the cosy grey coats that had previously been issued in Van Diemen’s Land were replaced with the magpie suits, the prisoners knew that they were being made to wear these clothes ‘for the purpose of humbling and mortifying our spirits’. Taking their cue from the absurdity of their ‘motley, grotesque’ garments, the convicts ‘danced about and sung songs as though we were in a real perfect delirium of joy,’ Gates said. ‘A few cursed and swore like madmen possessed’ and ‘succeeded in some measure in making our masters ashamed of the matter’.
Yet these elaborate costumes were in demand, not only as prison and work clothing but also as money spinners for imprisoned entrepreneurs. Two sets of these cloths could be taken apart and re-stitched into one grey and one yellow set. Using dye made from bush plants and some stolen military scarlet, the rebirthed suit could be unloaded on soldiers. The buttons were used as currency within the prison system.
Female prisoners were dressed in various ways, or not. Many of the First Fleet women transported aboard the Lady Penrhyn arrived half naked, their rotting and worn-out clothing hanging from their emaciated bodies. Women clothed themselves as best they could in the early years of the colony. From 1804 most were sent to the Parramatta Female Factory where they were employed in sewing, spinning or domestic tasks.
By 1826 all new entrants to the factory were made to bathe and inspected by the matron. Their clothing was a blue or brown gown, jacket and a coarse white apron. The beginnings of the class system had by now been introduced and women of the first, most obedient class, were given a white cap, a long dress frilled with muslin, a red calico jacket, two checked handkerchiefs, petticoats, aprons, shifts, stockings, shoes and a straw bonnet. These were for wearing mainly on Sunday. For weekdays they had calico caps, a serge petticoat, a jacket and one apron.
From 1829 the inmates of female factories generally received a cotton petticoat, jacket, two aprons, two shifts, two caps, two handkerchiefs, two pairs of stockings and one ‘common straw bonnet of strong texture’. Women were usually graded into three classes—first class were good prisoners, second class relatively minor re-offenders and third class were the frequent troublemakers. The second class was made to wear a large yellow letter ‘C’ on the jacket sleeve, while third class inmates wore it on the right sleeve and on the back of their jacket and petticoat. Women in the third, most refractory class, could be made to work breaking stones on the roads.
There is more than a touch of irony around elaborate clothing provided to female and male convicts. In those days clothes were worth a great deal of money and it was not uncommon for poor people to dress in rags, or sometimes less. The largest class of crime for which convicts were transported involved stealing clothes, or the materials for making them. Now, no matter how strangely, they were dressed at the expense of the state.
Even well into the 1830s it was possible, and often necessary, for men to marry convict women. There was a decidedly unromantic bureaucratic process available for this necessity at the Parramatta Female Factory:
A man desiring a wife, and being unable to suit himself elsewhere, proceeds to the female factory at Parramatta, and presents himself to the matron and master of that institution. The certificate of a clergyman or magistrate is produced; setting forth that the applicant is a proper person to have a wife given to him, from the many under charge of the matron. The applicant is then introduced into a room of the building, whilst the matron proceeds to the class department, that contains the best behaved of the female convicts. Notice is here given that a wife is required, and such as are willing to be married step forward, and are marshaled in batches into the presence of the would-be Benedict. On they pass, the man speaking to individuals as they attract his attention, inquiring their age, etc. till some one is met with who pleases his taste, and possesses the required perfections.
The couple then negotiated. Had the other been married? How many sheep, cattle and how much land did the man possess? If both parties then agreed, ‘the matron is acquainted with the fact, and a day named for the marriage’.
All the time, this lady is present, and has frequently to witness strange and ludicrous scenes; scores of females passing for review, between whose personal and other claims, the applicant balances his mind, sometimes leaving it to the matron to decide whom he shall take. When this knotty point is settled, the authorities are informed of the fact; the clergy of the place publishes the banns, and if no impediment intervenes, on the appointed day, the parties are married; the woman leaving the factory, and returning to a state of freedom in the colony, during good conduct.
Marriage through this process was frequent and was reportedly how thousands of lonely men obtained wives. It was also a way out of the severe restrictions of the female factory for the women. Through much of its early history, Australia was plagued by a serious disparity between the number of males and the number of marriageable females. This early solution to the problem was an effective matchmaking arrangement long before speed dating and internet partnering agencies.
Marriage between female convicts who were assigned servants and ex-convicts could be more complicated, if we can believe James Mudie, a notorious flogging magistrate. In his heavily biased The Felonry of New South Wales, Mudie described an event he claimed was true.
A young man who had recently completed his sentence established himself on 30 acres along with a few pigs. He was a long way up the country but set out for the Parramatta Female Factory to find himself a wife. On the way he stopped at Mudie’s extensive property, known as ‘Castle Forbes’, and was told by one of the female servants that the master had a young convict woman named Marianne as an assignee. If she was willing, he could get a good wife without going any further. ‘Celebs’, as Mudie contemptuously calls the young man, asked to see Marianne. The couple hit it off and agreed to proceed. But first they had to obtain the consent of the master. Marianne volunteered to make the request.
Entering the breakfast room of her master with an unusually engaging aspect, and having made her obeisance in her best style, the following dialogue ensued:
Marianne.—I wish to ask you a favour, your honour.
His Honour.—Why, Marianne, you have no great reason to expect particular indulgence; but what is it?
Marianne (curtsying and looking still more interesting).—I hope your honour will allow me to get married.
His Honour.—Married! To whom?
Marianne (rather embarrassed).—To a young man, your honour.
His Honour.—To a young man! What is he?
Marianne (her embarrassment increasing).—I really don’t know!
His Honour.—What is his name?
Marianne.—I can’t tell.
His Honour.—Where does he live?
Marianne.—I don’t know, your honour.
His Honour.—You don’t know his name, nor what he is, nor where he lives! Pray how long have you known him?
Marianne (her confusion by no means over).—Really, to tell your honour the truth, I never saw him till just now. Mrs. Parsons sent for me to speak to him; and so we agreed to be married, if your honour will give us leave. It’s a good chance for me. Do, your honour, give me leave!
His Honour.—Love at first sight, eh! Send the young man here.
At this point in the story, Marianne leaves and the young man enters to face his interrogation:
His Honour.—Well, young man, I am told you wish to marry Marianne, one of my convict servants.
Celebs (grinning).—That’s as you please, your honour.
His Honour.—As I please—Why, have you observed the situation the young woman is in? (Marianne being ‘in the way ladies wish to be who love their lords.’)
Celebs (grinning broadly).—Why, your honour, as to that, you know, in a country like this, where women are scarce, a man shouldn’t be too ‘greedy!’ I’m told the young woman’s very sober, and that’s the main chance with me. If I go to the factory, why, your honour knows I might get one in the same way without knowing it, and that, you know, might be cause of words hereafter, and she might be a drunken vagabond besides! As to the pickaninny, if it should happen to be a boy, you know, your honour, it will soon be useful, and do to look after the pigs.
After checking on the young man’s situation and whether or not he was free, permission was graciously given for the union. The author claimed only to be giving ‘some idea of the nature of rustic courtship in New South Wales, and of the relations towards each other of the two sexes of the felon population, as well as of the charming prospect attendant upon a convict wedding’. Mudie concluded with the observation that this was ‘a state of things difficult to be conceived in England, and certainly unparalleled in any civilized country’.
Perhaps the most powerful of all the convict ballads, this song is also known as ‘Moreton Bay’ and ‘The Exile’s Lament’. It is generally thought to have been written by Francis MacNamara, or ‘Frank the Poet’. If he did not compose it, he certainly knew it, as did many other old lags.
Many ‘places of condemnation’ are mentioned, but the main action centres on the death of Captain Logan, commandant of the Moreton Bay penal station around fourteen kilometres north of present-day Brisbane from 1826 to 1830. Logan was hated by the convicts as a cruel flogger. He was killed by Aborigines in October 1830 and when his body was brought back to the settlement, those who had suffered under his floggings ‘manifested insane joy at the news of his murder, and sang and hoorayed all night, in defiance of the warders’. And someone wrote this song.
One Sunday morning as I went walking,
By Brisbane waters I chanced to stray,
I heard a convict his fate bewailing,
As on the sunny river bank I lay.
I am a native from Erin’s island,
But banished now from my native shore,
They stole me from my aged parents,
And from the maiden I do adore.
I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie,
At Norfolk Island and Emu Plains,
At Castle Hill and at cursed Toongabbie,
At all these settlements I’ve been in chains.
But of all places of condemnation,
And penal stations in New South Wales,
To Moreton Bay I have found no equal,
Excessive tyranny each day prevails.
For three long years I was beastly treated,
And heavy irons on my legs I wore,
My back from flogging was lacerated,
And oft times painted with my crimson gore.
And many a man from downright starvation,
Lies mouldering now underneath the clay,
And Captain Logan he had us mangled,
All at the triangles of Moreton Bay.
Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews,
We were oppressed under Logan’s yoke,
Till a native black lying there in ambush,
Did deal this tyrant his mortal stroke.
My fellow prisoners be exhilarated,
That all such monsters such a death may find,
And when from bondage we are liberated,
Our former sufferings will fade from mind.
‘The Convict’s Lament’ lived on among convicts and ex-convicts. It was passed on by word of mouth and in handwritten form to the free-born generations in the prison system. Ned Kelly knew it well, as did his family, probably learned from their father ‘Red’ Kelly who was imprisoned in Port Arthur at the same time as Frank the Poet. The song is still sung today, its stark poetry and fine tune evoking the evils of the convict system.
Work. Who did it, when, where and how? These questions were at the base of Governor Phillip’s plans for a colony. He assumed that the convicts would work to provide the necessities of survival and to build the infrastructure to develop the economy and the society. But they had other ideas.
Convicts did not want to work. Nor did the circumstances of their imprisonment in the early years of New South Wales encourage it. Basically roaming around almost as free men and women, they came and went as they pleased, malingered, hid their tools and generally bludged, as we might say today. The only way the colonial authorities could make transportees perform the work required was to force them to it.
Men were formed into labour gangs to carry out specific tasks, such as erecting public buildings and making roads. A road gang or ‘party’ was the most common form of labour unit and the easiest. Men received reasonable rations, could cook for themselves, even if it was, as described by one ex-convict, ‘often a straggling piece of meat with about as much fat on it as would grease the eye of a packing needle’. They also had the small but coveted freedom to find their own beds for the night, even if only ‘a sheet of ti-tree bark’.14 Men who committed crimes in the colony, or were considered troublemakers, or simply fell foul of an official could end up in an ironed gang.
The road gangs were paradise compared with the hard labour of the ironed gang. The work was just as arduous, usually involving hacking through bush and mountain rock, but was carried out in full chains. The exact nature and weight of the chains varied from place to place and over time, but they usually consisted of an iron collar around each ankle joined by a chain. Weighing perhaps 6 kilograms, these irons were placed on each man by a blacksmith. The collars cut into the prisoners’ flesh, making exertion even more painful. At night the gang was fettered together, usually to a convenient tree, and each individual had to make himself as comfortable as possible. Rations were generally poorer and those who attempted to escape might have extra chains loaded on them during the day and the night. Even if they went to hospital, chains might not be removed from a sick convict and, it was said, some were even buried in their shackles.
In 1835 an educated convict in the ninth year of his sentence wrote home to a ‘Gentleman in London’. The writer of the letter said that discipline had become increasingly severe during his time in the colony:
Every year has increased its severity since I have been here.—Disobedience or insolence is fifty lashes—first offence not less than twenty-five; second offence seventy-five or a hundred lashes; third offence twelve months to an Iron Gang. Absconding—or Taking-the-Bush, as we term it—is fifty lashes first offence; second time TWELVE Months to an IRON GANG, and increased each offence.
The letter went on to describe the iron gangs:
Nothing is more dreaded by the men than Iron Gangs; as when their sentence is expired they have all that time spent in irons to serve again, as every sentence is now in addition to the original sentence. If a man is nearly due for his ticket of leave, and is flogged, he is put back for a certain time, unless for theft, and then he forfeits every indulgence. If an iron-gang man has served any number of years in the country, he must begin again; he is the same as a new hand; he has to wait the whole term of years before he receives any indulgence.
The work of the iron gangs was hard and long: ‘The delinquents are employed in forming new roads, by cutting through mountains, blasting rocks, cutting the trees up by the roots, felling and burning off.’ Their labour was made more difficult by the appalling conditions:
They are attended by a Military Guard, night and day, to prevent escape; wear Irons upon both legs, and at night are locked up in small wooden houses, containing about a dozen sleeping places; escape is impossible; otherwise they live in huts surrounded by high paling, called stockades; they are never allowed after labour to come without the stockade under penalty of being shot; so complete is the confinement, that not half-a-dozen have escaped within the last two or three years; they labour from one hour after sunrise until eleven o’clock, then two hours to dinner and work until night; no supper. The triangles are constantly at hand to tie up any man neglecting work, or insolent. Iron-Gang Men [are] not allowed to be hut keepers, cooks, or other occupation, as such is considered an indulgence; nothing but hard labour. Not one day of liberty will he ever enjoy; he will have all his sentences in addition to his original sentence to again.
The letter concluded:
Picture to yourself this hot climate, the labour and the ration, and judge for yourself if there is laxity of discipline. It is to places such as I have described, that the Judges now sentence men from the English bar—poor wretches! did they know their fate, be assured, respected Sir, it had been well for them had they never been born.
The Innocence of Thomas Drewery
In September 1847, Thomas Drewery, a chemist from Kingston Upon Hull, arrived at Geelong aboard the Joseph Somes under the Pentonville scheme. Convicted of stealing a horse and gig in York, he was given a seven-year sentence, all the while maintaining his innocence. He had already spent eighteen months in prison when he embarked for Australia to serve the rest of his time.
On arrival at Geelong, Thomas received his conditional pardon and was immediately offered a job but turned it down as he considered the salary ‘beneath my notice’. He travelled to Melbourne where he soon found suitable employment as the business manager of the Melbourne Medical Hall.
Continuing to protest his innocence through a solicitor and the efforts of his wife and friends in England, Thomas had an almost unbelievable stroke of good luck. A convict in Van Diemen’s Land confessed to the crime for which Thomas was suffering. Convicted of an unrelated crime and transported to Van Diemen’s Land, John Webster heard about Thomas Drewery’s plight and had an attack of conscience. He provided a full and convincing confession to the religious instructor. This was forwarded to the British government but they would not believe it.
Agitation by Drewery’s solicitor, local newspapers and parliamentarians eventually brought his case to public attention and he secured a pardon in January 1848, together with passage home paid by the government. His troubles were over. He wrote home to his wife, Elizabeth:
My dear, here are fresh proofs of your husband’s innocence…I hope you will give this publicity in the press, to erase any stigma my position may have brought upon you and friends.
The only compensation I ask is that government will send you and my dear children out to me respectably, not as the wife of a convict.
Elizabeth and the five children had been in severe financial difficulties during Thomas’s imprisonment. They also suffered the social stigma of Thomas’s fall from middle-class respectability to convict. Thomas decided that his prospects, and those of his family, would be better in Australia. He requested that Elizabeth and the children have their passage paid by the government, rather than his returning home. Correspondence on this and the payment of the passage dragged on but, eventually, the system delivered a result: Thomas was reunited with his wife and children in Australia.
He went on to run a number of businesses in Melbourne, and to serve as a local councillor. By 1858 the family was in Dunolly, Victoria, where Thomas returned to his old profession. He died soon after and his widow and children moved to Castlemaine, once again struggling to get by. Elizabeth died in 1864, leaving two children in the care of the eldest daughter, Ann. Two others were taken into care under the Neglected and Criminal Children’s Act.
Thomas Drewery was one of a significant number of convicts transported to what would be the colony of Victoria and to its capital city, Melbourne. There was an early attempt to establish a penal settlement in what was then the ‘Port Phillip district of New South Wales’ from October 1803. The settlement was to be near present-day Sorrento. As well as officers, officials and marines, about three hundred convicts were landed, together with the wives and children of a few. Unable to find suitable land and clashing with the local Wathaurung people, the colony was progressively abandoned between January and May 1804. The party returned to Hobart, except for a few convicts who had escaped. One of these, William Buckley, became famous for spending the next thirty-two years living with the Wathaurung.
Victoria did not become a colony until 1851, but between 1844 and 1849 almost 2000 convicts were transported to the Port Phillip district. Mostly sent from Pentonville, Millbank and Parkhurst prisons, these boys and men like Thomas Drewery were officially described as ‘exiles’ rather than convicts. Although they had been convicted of crime, the idea of the scheme was to provide skilled labour. Quickly dubbed the ‘Pentonvillains’ by the unhappy free residents of Melbourne and Geelong, these transports were welcomed by farmers desperate for labour. The Pentonvillains were granted conditional pardons as soon as they arrived, allowing them to work and live freely as long as they did not return to Britain until their full sentences had been served.
Whether as a colony in its own right or as the Port Phillip district of New South Wales, Victoria also experienced convictism through work parties sent down from Sydney or across from Hobart in the earlier days of settlement and, of course, through the arrival of ex-convicts in search of work, gold or land. Ned Kelly’s father, ‘Red’, was one of many ex-convicts who made lives for themselves and their families in the ‘cabbage patch’, as Victoria became known to many in New South Wales.
‘The Most Absurd, Prodigal, and Impracticable Vision’
Criticism of convict transportation began early. In 1791 an irritated correspondent calling himself ‘Tumbledown’ wrote to the editor of a popular journal on ‘the new settlement at Botany Bay’. Like most people who had never visited New South Wales, Tumbledown was under the misapprehension that the colony was established at Botany Bay. His argument, such as it was, revolved around the costs of the system and what the writer considered the impracticality of settlement:
Previous to the 18th of March, 1791, 2,029 convicts have been shipped from England for New South Wales. We also learned that prior to the 9th of February, in the same year, the expences [sic] of this establishment amounted to £374,000. Besides this sum, we are told of contingencies that cannot as yet be stated! It was for the Minister’s credit to make his project appear as wise as possible, and to suppress a part of this enormous expenditure to serve the temporary purposes of debate. We may safely affirm that the contingencies referred to make no trifling sum. Six additional months fall now to be added to the account, and it is more reasonable to compute the total expences up to this date at £600,000.
Tumbledown calculated that each convict cost 300 pounds sterling. If the average duration of transportation was twenty years, that worked out at 1500 pounds sterling per transportee. A great deal of money. And not only that, what about the cost of developing the country?
It may indeed be acknowledged that before that time the country will be reduced to a state of cultivation. But a circumstance mentioned by the Governor sufficiently shows the great distance and uncertainty of such a prospect. It cost him and a party five days to penetrate thirty miles into the desert, and the fatigues they underwent during this journey were excessive.
And there was more fearful expense:
In the same paper you tell us that 1,831 additional convicts were then under orders for shipping. It is impossible to estimate with any degree of certainty what may be the annual expence [sic] of this colony before the end of the Eighteenth Century. By a very moderate computation we may suppose that before ten years elapse the colony will receive at least 10,000 additional convicts; and it is but fair to compute that of the whole number by that time transported 10,000 will then be alive, and maintained at the expence of Government. Now, if each of these gentry cost us only £30 a year, the whole annual expence would amount to £300,000. At the end of twenty years it may rise to double that sum. Will the British nation, with its eyes open, walk into such a gulf?
We must infer that the Botany Bay scheme is the most absurd, prodigal, and impracticable vision that ever intoxicated the mind of man. Transportation to North America was in comparison but a ride before breakfast. New South Wales is at the distance of 6,000 or 8,000 leagues, if we include the windings and turnings necessary on the passage. In the former country the price of a felon when landed was sufficient to pay the expence of his voyage; but in the latter, a convict, the moment we set him on shore, is enrolled with many other right honourable gentlemen in the respectable and useful band of national pensioners. There is not an old woman in the three kingdoms who could not have suggested a better plan.
Tumbledown finished his diatribe with the likelihood that the convicts would cut the throats of their jailers and sail away.
There would be many more letters of this kind to many more newspaper and magazine editors in the coming years. People also sent in accounts of corruption and exploitation that the system made possible, even easy, for those so inclined. In November 1791 the master, chief mate and some soldiers and sailors aboard the transport Neptune came before a court at Guildhall in England. The accusation was that:
They sailed from Portsmouth in the Neptune, Capt. Donald Thrale [Trail], and William Ellington, chief mate, having on board 500 male convicts, bound to Botany Bay; that during the voyage the captain and chief mate used the unhappy convicts ill by keeping them short in their allowance, allowing only half a pint of water a day; that 171 died on their voyage; that many of them were so hungry that they have seen several take the chews of tobacco from the mouths of the men that lay dead on the deck; that numbers used to steal the provisions from the hogs; and that when they arrived at Botany Bay the captain and mate stopped the boxes of many, took the things out, and threw the boxes overboard; that, soon after they had landed the convicts, the captain and mate opened a warehouse on the island, and sold the provisions which the unhappy convicts ought to have had; that, when landed, they were swarming with vermin; and that, on account of the above persons making complaint, they had been very ill-treated by the captain and mate, and had wounds to shew of the ill-treatment they had received.
Eventually, agitation at home and discontent in the growing colony would bring about a powerful anti-transportation lobby demanding, and receiving, inquiries into the system and its ills. These agitations culminated in two large public protests when the transport Hashemey reached Sydney in 1849. Speeches were made, including by Henry Parkes, later to be known as ‘the father of Federation’, and dire warnings declared.
But feelings had been running high for some years. The number of free settlers and emancipists eclipsed the number of convicts by the 1830s, by which time opposition to transportation had become a major political issue in New South Wales and was making waves back in Britain. In the public debates of the time, poems were often used to argue political points of view. One of these referred to Australia being ‘overwhelm’d by streams corrupt, impure/The refuse and the vile’, ‘Britain’s filth and scum’, debauched daughters, debased sons and sodomy. Colonists, the males at least, were exhorted in the final verse to righteous rebellion:
Secure your liberty,
Ne’er rest till Transportation dies;
And Australia’s isle be FREE.
If freedom can be equated with the abolition of a harsh system of penal transportation, then the existing colonies of Australia received theirs from the day transportation was officially ended.