‘Female Factory, Cascades’, Hobart, Tasmania, from glass plate negatives and photographs collected by E.R. Pretyman, 1870–1930.
I’ll give the law a little shock, remember what I say,
They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones in chains to Botany Bay
Latter day convict ballad
Convicts transported to New South Wales did not only come from Britain. In 1820 ex-private Michael Keane (Kain), drum and fife player late of Her Majesty’s 59th Regiment, landed at Sydney Cove aboard the Seaflower. He came from India. His sentence was for life.
What had he done to deserve spending the rest of his life as a convict? It all began when the 25-year-old Irishman enlisted in the British Army in 1805:
I very soon fell in with companions that lead me into all kind mischeiff, which brought me sooner to feill the affecttes of punishment then I should have dun if I had kep my owne companey; I was indused by two of them to stop out of Barrack’s a day and a night, and losing a fife, I recavid seventy five lashess on the britche; then went to Formoy, and on my routh there 1806, for losing a bealt and drum, which was stoel from me at Broff, I recavid one hundred lashess on the britch, and this I got through a yeoman drummer takeen them from the house I was billited at; the went to Charealfield and Dowearalle, I stopet at the halfe way house, and for getting drunk the drum major struck me, and I struck him with the fire poker, It was tryad at Charealfield, and sentaince to receive three hundred lashess, but I got one hundered and and fifty on the bak and britch; I often thought to desart, but I did not, this hapened in the yeare 1807.
Between then and his trial and sentence of transportation, Michael Keane lived a harsh life as a soldier in constant trouble with his comrades and officers. While still in Ireland he was court-martialled for being absent from his guard post, receiving 175 lashes, though originally sentenced to 300. He sailed with his regiment to the West Indies where he fought the French in Martinique: ‘I underwent a good dail of hardship there for three months in the field, three days and nights without eating any thing only the duice of sugear cane.’ After stealing rum, flour and beef from a native, Keane was tied to a tree and given 250 lashes. A few hours later he was in battle and wounded in the knee.
In 1810 Keane again fought the French and Dutch on Guadalupe and other islands. Accused of drunkenness by a sergeant, Keane was flayed with 400 lashes. He was wounded twice in the engagements and eventually went into hospital at Guadalupe in 1811. Caught outside the hospital grounds without a pass, Keane was sentenced to a mammoth flogging of 900 strokes, though received only 700. In 1813 a dispute led to Keane striking a sergeant with a bayonet and abusing the sergeant-major. A court martial awarded him 800 stripes, of which he received 700.
But by 1814, the well-whipped soldier had been promoted to sergeant and drum major. After a boozy day and night at a Guadalupe tavern, he stole a ring from a native woman and was again court-martialled. Reduced to the ranks, Keane only received a ‘light’ 300 lashes this time. He was later given another 200 lashes for drunkenness and abusing a sergeant, and then in 1815 Keane was discharged and returned to England. But without means to support himself he soon re-enlisted in a regiment bound for Bengal. It did not take long for the old pattern to re-appear. On the voyage to India he was—as always, by his claims—wrongfully accused of drunkenness and threats. He was sentenced to 300 lashes, receiving 225.
After months of fighting, Keane took to ‘desarting’—again and again. On the first three occasions he suffered 900 lashes. The fourth time he was thrown into solitary confinement for ninety-three days with no pay. Then he deserted once more but was recognised in Calcutta, arrested and court-martialled. Perhaps exasperated with the recalcitrant soldier, the army sentenced him to transportation for life. In his autobiography, Keane wrote:
I landed in Sydney the 2nd May 1820 wheare the mother of misfortuane kep close to me, and still remains a companion of mine, for I had not been long in Sydney before I was taken before the Magistrates, and recavid 50 lashes for stoping out of barracks one night. In a very short time after I was sent to the police for gone oute of the ranks to buy some tubacoo and for not tipping the overseer when I joynd the gang, he took me before the Magistrates, and I was sentaince to be put in the solitary cells for 14 days, for the above crime, which I served and when I came out of the cells, I went to wheare I had my cloths and I came to the Dog and Duck on the Brickfield Hill where I remaind drinking untill six o’clock in the evning and then came to the Barracks.
Keane went to work the next day but was soon arrested and tried for stealing an iron axle tree—which he did not do. He was sent to the Newcastle area for two years and ended up in a lime burning gang.
And then I begone my hardship at that place. I never dun any work in my life before, I did not no how to get on, I was sick and I was sent to the Hospital, and the place the Dacter put me was in the dead house, wheare I remaind for five days upon halfe pound a bread and one pint of grual a day. I was almost dead in this place for the two years that I was at Newcastle I underwent a grate dail of hardship—through starvation neakedness and solitary confinement sometimes on the bar for 7 days and some times in the cells for 14 and 21 days at a time without any kind of covering only on the coald flagg stone withaut any kind of clothing.
While he was at Newcastle, Keane received a total of 1475 lashes, and spent 123 days in the cells on a pound of bread a day.
Then it was back to Sydney and then to ‘joyne a gang up the country’. True to his character, Keane was soon in trouble again and was sent to Port Macquarie where, after two years, he was brought ‘all most to deaths door through flogging and starvation’. During this time, he suffered 1525 lashes and twenty-eight days in the cells on bread and water.
Transferred back to Sydney, his drunkenness earned him four painful days on the treadmill. Then, wrongly accused again of theft, he was sent to the ironed gang to work in chains for three months. But here ‘I could not stop through the tyranny of the overseer and half starved’. He absconded and received fourteen days on the treadmill after recapture. Michael Keane summed up his astonishing life of soldiering, petty crime, drunkenness and flogging:
I have been cruley used in this countary, through tyrints of overseers and constobles that was at Newcastle and Port Macquarie that I was under; and now for life in the countary, after been 15 years in the army, foure time wounded in the field of Battle, and now poor and miserable and despised by every one above me. The corproal punshment that I recavid sence the 5th June, 1805 untill the 26th September 1826, is sevean thousand two hundered and fifty lashess, and three hundered and foure days in the solitary cells between the army and been a prisoner.
This ‘Botany Bay hero’, as he wryly called himself, finished his life story with what must surely be one of the great understatements: ‘I still remain, the same Michael Keane, Altho’ not so well in health and strenth, as I would wish to have beane.’
Thrown Unpitied and Friendless Upon the World
Wages for agricultural workers in southern England were dropping fast through the 1820s. The introduction of mechanical threshing machines quickly made many manual tasks obsolete. Faced with starvation, farm labourers rose in a spontaneous and uncoordinated rebellion known as the ‘Swing Riots’ in August 1830. The insurrection was a serious shock to the established order. It was quickly and brutally put down and many of those arrested were executed or were transported to Australia over the next few years.
In the aftermath of these disturbances the formation of a union by a group of Dorset agricultural workers was seen by the local authorities as another threat to social order. While the organisation of a union was no longer illegal, the taking of secret oaths was an offence. New members were blindfolded while they swore allegiance on a Bible. The blindfold was removed to reveal a macabre painting of a large human skeleton holding a scythe in one hand and an hourglass in the other. These clandestine actions were enough for the arrest and trial of brothers George and James Loveless, father and son Thomas and John Standfield, James Brine and James Hammett. They all came from the village of Tolpuddle and all except James Hammett were devout Methodists. Their sentence was transportation for seven years. They were held in prison in Dorchester until the morning of 27 March 1834, when:
We received orders early this morning to prepare ourselves for the coach bound to Portsmouth. After we were ironed together the coach drove up to the castle door and we mounted: the officer in charge was a Mr. Glenister. We arrived at Portsmouth about eight o’clock in the evening, and were instantly conveyed to the York hulk; the irons that we wore from Dorchester being struck off, and fresh ones put on.
After a few days of preparation and changing of irons:
On the 11th April we weighed anchor and bore away for New South Wales. I then began to feel the misery of transportation.—confined down with a number of the most degraded and wretched criminals, each man having to contend with his fellow or be trodden under foot. The rations, which were served out daily, were of the worst quality, and very deficient in quantity, owing to the peculations indulged in by those officers whose duty it is to attend that department. In addition to this, the crowded state of the vessel, rendering it impossible for the prisoners to lie down at full length to sleep, the noxious state of the atmosphere, and the badness and saltness of the provisions, induced disease and suffering which it is impossible to describe.
Added to all this, in the case of myself and brethren, the agonizing reflection that we had done nothing deserving this punishment, and the consciousness that our families, thus suddenly deprived of their protectors, and a stigma affixed to their names, would probably be thrown unpitied and friendless upon the world.
They arrived in Sydney on 17 August and were marched to Hyde Park Barracks. ‘We had all been assigned to our respective masters previous to coming on shore, and we had not been in the barracks more than three hours when James Brine was called for by the messenger to proceed to his master.’
James Brine takes up the story:
I was assigned to Dr. Mitchell, Surgeon of the Government Hospital, and in a short time proceeded to the farm of Robert Scott, Esq., at Glindon, Hunter’s River. I went on board the steam-boat, and reached the green hills the following day. I had then about thirty miles to travel on land before reaching the place of my destination. My master had given me at starting, a small bed and blanket to take with me, and one shilling to bear my expenses, besides a suit of new slops.
On landing, being weary and fatigued, I laid down to take rest under a gum-tree. During the night the bushrangers came upon me and robbed me of all I possessed, excepting the old clothes I had on, which were given me at Portsmouth. On Sept. 7th I arrived at the farm at Glindon, exhausted from want of food, having had but one meal for three days.
I was instantly taken by the overseer to the master, who asked me where my slops and bedding were. I told him the bushrangers had robbed me; but he swore that I was a liar, and said that he would give me a ‘D-d good flogging’ in the morning. ‘You are one of the Dorsetshire machine-breakers,’ said he; ‘but you are caught at last.’ He gave me nothing to eat until the following day. In the morning I was employed to dig post-holes, and during the day he came and asked how I was getting on. I told him I was doing as well as I could, but was unable to do much through weakness, and that having walked so far without shoes, my feet were so cut and sore I could not put them to the spade.
‘If you utter another word of complaint,’ said he, ‘I will put you in the lock-up; and if you ask me for another article for six months to come, or if you do not do your work like another man, or do not attend to the overseer’s orders, whatever they may be, I will send you up to Mr. Moody, where no mercy shall be shown to you.’
I afterwards got a piece of an iron hoop and wrapped it round my foot to tread upon, and for six months, until I became due, I went without shoes, clothes, or bedding, and lay on the bare ground at night.
Brine then spent seventeen days up to his chest in water dipping sheep. He caught a bad cold and asked his master for something to cover himself at night, even a piece of horsecloth. He refused:
‘I will give you nothing until you are due for it. What would your masters in England have to cover them if you had not been sent here? I understand it was your intention to have murdered, burnt, and destroyed everything before you, and you are sent over here to be severely punished, and no mercy shall be shown you. If you ask me for anything before the six months is expired, I will flog you as often as I like.’
He then asked me to explain to him the designs of the Union, and said if I would tell him it would be a good thing for me, as he would try to get me a ticket of indulgence. I told him that I knew nothing of what he was talking, and that the Unions had no idea of murdering, burning, or destroying. ‘You know all about it,’ said he, ‘and it will be better for you to tell me.’
I still replied that I had nothing to communicate. He then said, ‘You d-d convict, if you persist in this obstinacy and insolence I will severely punish you! Don’t you know that not even the hair on your head is your own. Go to your hut or I will kick you.’ My master was a magistrate!
Back in England the Tolpuddle men were popular heroes but their families were suffering. When they applied for parish relief, they were refused as the local landowners still feared the power of organised labour. In a letter to the supporters, the martyrs’ wives wrote: ‘Tolpuddle have for many years been noticed for tyranny and oppression and cruelty and now the union is broke up here.’ Fortunately, the issue was the object of intense political agitation. Funds for the support of the families were donated.
The Tolpuddle Martyrs were conditionally pardoned in 1835 and received full pardons in 1836. They returned to England where all except James Hammett continued to fight for what was then considered the radical cause of universal male suffrage, the right of every adult to vote and other significant political reforms. Eventually, still harassed, all but Hammett emigrated with their families to Ontario, Canada, where they began new lives. Today they are remembered as heroes of the early trade union movement.
Poor ‘Bony’ Anderson was mad. It wasn’t his fault. Orphaned at an early age he was brought up in the workhouse and sent to sea in a collier at the age of nine. It was a tough apprenticeship and when it was over he went aboard a man-o-war as a British sailor. Badly wounded in the head at the Battle of Navarino, he became a violent young man, easily provoked by drink or offence. The inevitable happened and he was involved in a brawl with other drunken sailors during which several shops were looted. Charles Anderson was arrested, tried and sentenced to seven years in New South Wales. He was eighteen.
After arriving in the colony in 1834 Anderson was sent to the tiny Goat Island in Sydney Harbour to work in the stone quarry. According to an account based partly on Anderson’s testimony:
He remained there about two months under treatment so severe that, to escape it, he absconded. Apprehended and taken to Sydney Barracks, he there received 100 lashes for this offence; and upon being returned to Goat Island he received 100 more lashes, and was to wear irons for twelve months, in addition to his original sentence. Before completing it he had received 1,200 lashes for trivial offences, such as looking round from his work, or at a steamer in the river, &c. He again absconded, was reapprehended, taken back to the island, and received 200 lashes; afterwards he was tried for the same offence and was sentenced to 100 lashes more, and to be chained to a rock for two years with barely a rag to cover him.
Anderson was fastened to the rock with a 26-foot chain secured to his waist. His legs were weighted with irons. A hollow was chiselled out of the rock just big enough for him to squeeze into. At night a wooden lid pierced with holes was secured over his head until the next morning. In this living grave, he was fed like a zoo animal, meagre meals pushed to him by a long pole. None were allowed to come near him or communicate with him on pain of flogging. A convict mate managed to get the chained man a quid of tobacco and received a hundred lashes for his mercy.
Regarded as a wild beast, people passing in boats would throw him bits of bread or biscuit.
Exposed to all weathers, and without clothing on his back and shoulders, which were covered with sores from repeated floggings, the maggots rapidly engendered in a hot climate feeding upon his flesh, he was denied even water to bathe his wounds, such denial being not an unusual portion of the punishment to which he had been condemned; and when rain fell, or by any other means he could obtain liquid, he would lie and roll in it in agony.
After some weeks of this inhuman treatment, Governor Bourke offered Anderson his freedom if he would agree to work—‘but he answered he would not; adding, that if he worked, he would be punished, and if he did not work, he would be punished the same’. The governor had him sent to Port Macquarie for life. Here, Anderson carried lime from the quarry to the barges, burning the skin off his back. Anderson then escaped and lived with Aborigines until recaptured and returned to 200 lashes.
Later Anderson agreed to kill the overseer at Port Macquarie, saying he would rather be hanged than live as he was. He smashed in the overseer’s head with a spade and was bayoneted near to death by the guards. But he lived. Taken to Sydney and tried for the murder, he was sentenced to life on Norfolk Island, in double chains according to one account.
On Norfolk Island Anderson was tormented by other prisoners, goading him to acts of violence and insubordination just to see what would happen. By the time the new Superintendent Maconochie arrived in 1840, the wretched man had been punished ten times for violent assaults and many times for refusing to work and general insolence. He was now twenty-four years old, but looked forty. When the reforming Maconochie asked why Anderson was so incorrigible, he was told the man was ‘cranky’. The superintendent ordered the baiting to stop and Anderson was given responsibility for managing a group of bullocks. This kept him away from the other convicts and provided him with responsibility. The change was marked and Anderson was later put in charge of the new signal station on Mount Pitt. Here, dressed in a sailor’s uniform again, he had responsibility for keeping watch, slowly regaining his self-confidence, assisted by his particular love of gardening.
As well as rehabilitating such a lost character, Maconochie used his case as an example of the value of his penal reforms. When Governor George Gipps visited Norfolk Island three years later, he noticed Anderson contentedly going about his tasks dressed in a trim sailor suit and carrying a telescope. ‘What little smart fellow may that be?’ asked Sir George. ‘Who do you suppose? That is the man who was chained to the rock in Sydney Harbour,’ the superintendent replied. ‘Bless my soul, you do not mean to say so!’ was Sir George’s astonished rejoinder.
But although much reformed, Anderson’s underlying mental health issues continued. Although he regained his self-respect and ability to socialise, he was eventually transferred to a Sydney asylum. This was around the time that Maconochie was recalled, his reforms deemed too permissive in official circles. When a mutual acquaintance visited Anderson in the asylum, ‘the poor fellow recognised his visitor, and spoke of nothing but Captain Maconochie and his family’.
Anderson was later sent to another asylum where, amazingly perhaps, he was eventually declared sane. He was freed in 1854, his story providing ammunition for the many opponents of transportation. Charles Anderson’s mind was, perhaps, healed. But the marks on his body, tattooed with sun, moon, stars and Christian and nautical symbols of all kinds, as well as the scars of countless lashes, could never be erased.
Young George Boothroyd fell right into one of the oldest tricks in the world. His father sent him to cash a substantial cheque at the Yorkshire Bank in Huddersfield, presumably for his business. George got the money and began a pub crawl that ended up at the Green Dragon where he stayed the night. On Sunday morning, still woozy, he found himself in the house of Ruth Richardson. Ruth and her friends Lydia Clay, Mary Anne Wentworth and Elizabeth Quarmby were ‘nymphs of the pave’, as the press often described women who needed to make their living on the streets in 1845.
The women soon got foolish George gambling and very, very drunk. They knocked him down and took the money he was unwisely carrying. Somehow George managed to stagger back to the Green Dragon, where they had to put him to bed for a few hours before he was sober enough to report on his misadventure and identify his assailants.
The exact details of how much money was involved, as well as where and when George was parted from it, are murky but the four women were arrested, tried and convicted. They were sent to Van Diemen’s Land for ten years in 1846 and entered the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart. Established in the late 1820s, the Cascades was a prison, a workhouse and a nursery for the children of convicts. Women laboured for up to twelve hours a day in summer and were subjected to severe regulation, as laid out in the rules of 1829:
Females guilty of disobedience of orders, neglect of work, profane, obscene, or abusive language, insubordination, or other turbulent or disorderly or disrespectful conduct, shall be punished by the superintendent with close confinement in a dark or other cell, until her case shall be brought under consideration of the Principal Superintendent.
At the Cascades Female Factory, the four Huddersfield ‘nymphs’ were incorporated into the system like all the other female convicts. As well as their trade and place of origin, the state noted every personal detail—height, age, complexion, the size and shape of the head, hair colour, ‘visage’ or face shape, angle of the forehead, colour of eyes and eyebrows, size and shape of the nose and chin, as well as any marks, blemishes or other distinguishing bodily characteristics.
Lydia Clay was described as a ‘house maid’ of thirty-six years, and five and a quarter inches tall (without shoes). Her complexion was dark and her hair black, as were her eyes. With oval face, low forehead, long nose, large mouth and round chin, she was more than adequately catalogued as a creature of the state and easily identifiable. In case of any possible doubt, she had a mole on the inside of her right arm.
Short, dark and feisty, Lydia quickly became a troublemaker who refused to buckle to the system. She was insolent, insubordinate and sometimes absent without leave. On one of these occasions she was ‘found in bed with a man’ and sentenced to six months hard labour. After a good deal of time in solitary and at hard labour in the first few years of her sentence, Lydia settled down and was granted a ticket-of-leave in 1851 and a conditional pardon two years afterwards. Lydia married in 1850 but was widowed four years later when her husband was killed. A year later she remarried but in 1858 at the age of forty-eight, she was dead from an ‘abscess on the brain’.
Elizabeth Quarmby caused almost no trouble and was free in December 1855. She was married by this time and produced three children by 1860. It seems that the grog got the better of her. There was a separation and although Elizabeth took her husband to court, he refused to pay to support her. She had some satisfaction, though. Years later, her husband bigamously remarried and was jailed for three months. Elizabeth lived a pauper’s life until her death of ‘senile decay’ in 1893. She was seventy-two.
Mary Anne Wentworth and Ruth Richardson were well-behaved prisoners. Mary Anne married well while still serving her sentence, and then again after her first husband died. She lived comfortably until her death at the age of ninety-one in 1911. Ruth married a farmer, dropping her age on the marriage certificate by about fifteen years to twenty-one. She died of consumption, or tuberculosis, in 1858.
Sodomy and lesbianism were among the great paranoias suffered by the respectable classes of colonial society. ‘Unnatural’ practices among male convicts were endlessly highlighted in the press and official reports and inquiries, if not necessarily with a lot of evidence. Less frequently mentioned, because even more feared, was lesbianism among female convicts. When the press did get hold of such a story, they became quite obsessed with it, which is how the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart became notorious in the late 1830s for the activities, real or imputed, of the ‘Flash Mob’.
According to the press, the gaudy, party-loving Flash Mob was the main cause of ‘a system of vice, immorality, and iniquity, which has tended, mainly, to render the majority of female assigned servants, the annoying and untractable animals, that they are’. And this was only for starters. The article went on to outline the vile nature and activities of the convict women who made up the Flash Mob:
The Flash Mob at the Factory consists, as it would seem, of a certain number of women, who, by a simple process of initiation, are admitted into a series of unhallowed mysteries, similar, in many respects, to those which are described by Goethe, in his unrivalled Drama of Faust, as occurring, on particular occasions, amongst the supposed supernatural inhabitants of the Harz Mountains. Like those abominable Saturnalia, they are performed in the dark and silent hour of night, but, unlike those, they are performed in solitude and secrecy, amongst only the duly initiated.
With the fiendish fondness for sin, every effort, both in the Factory, and out of it, is made by these wretches, to acquire proselytes to their infamous practices; and, it has come to our knowledge, within these few days, that a simple-minded girl, who had been in one and the same service, since she left the ship—a period of nearly six months—very narrowly escaped seduction (we can use no stronger term) by a well-known, and most accomplished member of this unholy sisterhood. This practice constitutes one of the rules of the ‘order’ and we need not waste many words to show how perniciously it must act upon the ‘new hands,’ exposed to its influence.
Another rule is, that, should any member be assigned, she must return to the Factory, so soon as she has obtained (we need to say by what means) a sufficient sum of money to enable herself and her companion to procure such indulgences, as the Factory can supply—or, rather, as can be supplied by certain individuals, connected with the Factory. This sufficiently accounts for the contempt, which the majority of female prisoners entertain for the Factory, while it shows, also, why the solitary cell is considered the worst punishment.
Unable to decide ‘whether horror or indignation prevails most in our mind’, the journalist suggested the Cascades Female Factory should be called ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ and speculated breathlessly on the effect the mob was having on the moral fabric of the colony through the system of assigning convict women to work in the homes of settlers:
Good God! When we consider that these wretches in human form, are scattered through the Colony, and admitted into the house of respectable families, coming into hourly association with their sons and daughters, we shudder at the consequences, and cannot forbear asking the question: ‘Are there no means of preventing all this?’ Is the Superintendent of the Female House of Correction (!) afraid of these harpies? Or is he too indolent and too good-natured to trouble himself about the matter? We cannot think that either is the case; for we believe Mr. Hutchinson to be a righteous man, and not likely to tolerate such rank abomination. If he be ignorant of the practices to which we have referred, we will willingly afford him all the information, that we possess.
In concluding this painful subject, we may observe, that a favorite resort of this Flash Mob, when any of its members are out of the Factory, is the Canteen of a Sunday afternoon, and the Military Barracks of a Sunday night, where comfortable quarters may be procured until the morning! The whole system of Female Prison Discipline is bad and rotten at the very core, tending only to vice, immorality, and the most disgusting licentiousness.
Rants of this kind led inevitably to an ‘Inquiry Into Female Convict Discipline’ between 1841 and 1843. The inquiry named a number of women believed to be involved in these activities, including Ellen Scott.
Ellen was a servant in Limerick, transported for life for stealing a watch. Only eighteen when she arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, Ellen wasted no time disrupting the system. Her record catalogues continuing and frequent breaches of just about all the many rules and regulations applying to convict women. Her regular absences, thieving and other crimes, including ‘dancing in a public house’, earned her long periods of solitary confinement, a spiked iron collar and plenty of hard labour. She led an attack on the superintendent Mr Hutchinson (his wife was the matron) and was once found ‘in bed with her master’. All in all, forty-eight offences are recorded against Ellen between her arrival in 1830 and 1843 when she was found guilty of trafficking tobacco into the Launceston Female Factory, to where she had been transferred.
This transfer probably accounts for her relatively low-key presence in the inquiry’s report. She is mentioned, but no changes are laid against her, unlike a number of other women.
Whether there was ever a pseudo-Masonic secret society of lesbians at the Cascades, we will never know. Nor do we now care. In 1847, after some years without punishment, Ellen Scott received her freedom. She later married another ex-convict. Then, like so many others, she fades from the records.
There was still trouble with the rowdy girls at the Cascades in the mid-1840s and after. Some women simply refused to be cowed by the system. The records show convicts such as Helen Leslie, Catherine Owens, Phillis Perry and Mary Cuttle who were punished every few months for absconding, drunkenness and various forms of ‘indecency’ year after year, sometimes until they died. From the 1850s the institution was gradually dismantled as transportation ceased and the buildings were used for other purposes. But the women’s prison did not close until 1877. Today the place is recognised by UNESCO as the most important female convict site in Australia.
It is not well known that a large group of American and French-Canadian prisoners were sent to Australia in the wake of the Patriot War of 1837–38. A rebellion against British rule in Canada led by the French-speaking population drew in volunteer fighters from America. The rebellion was quickly and ruthlessly put down by the British, under the command of Sir George Arthur, previously Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, and the man after whom Port Arthur was named. Almost thirty of the Patriots were executed and the rest had their death sentences commuted to transportation. The French-Canadians were sent to New South Wales and the Americans to Van Diemen’s Land.
The French-Canadians arrived in Sydney in February 1840, fearing the worst for themselves in a penal colony operating a regime of hard labour. They were sent to Longbottom Farm, near present-day Concord Oval, and located around halfway between Sydney and Parramatta. The farm was almost derelict by 1840 but was rebuilt as Longbottom Stockade to hold the Patriots. Their status as political prisoners and their good conduct gave them a privileged position, assisted by their Roman Catholic religion which gave them assistance from the church. Father John Brady said mass for the prisoners and also looked out for their well-being. He wrote:
When I consider the courage of these prisoners, and their spirit of resignation, I cannot conceive how men so gentle, so modest and so good, whose conduct arouses the admiration of all those who are witnesses of it, can have deserved so terrible a punishment. They have had the misfortune to see themselves snatched from the arms of their wives and children; they have seen their homes and their possessions given over to pillage and to destruction by fire and after months of anguish, fear and shattered hopes, spent in the depths of prison cells, they received the terrible sentence which is to separate them from all they held dear in the world, so as to cast them into banishment in a far distant soil, where they are suffering through being deprived of the most necessary things.
While the French-Canadians avoided forced labour, their rations were the same as other convicts, Brady observed: ‘The food that they receive is so bad that the white Irish slave, accustomed to living on potatoes and salt could scarcely put up with it.’
The Patriots were fast-tracked to tickets-of-leave and within two years of their landing were assigned servants, enjoying the comparative liberty of that indulgence. By 1844 all had received free pardons. Most eventually returned home, though two died and one married and remained in the colony. A monument and some place names in the area commemorate this short but intense intercultural moment, including Canada Bay.
The Americans were not so lucky. In the eyes of the British government they were traitors, despite their citizenship. Discrimination against them began from the moment they left Canada. The French-Canadians were allowed to bring their clothes, belongings and money, while the Americans had to make do with whatever they had upon them. Massachusetts-born Samuel Snow wrote an account of the American experience in Van Diemen’s Land, which he considered ‘on the very south-eastern outskirts of habitable creation’.
When the American Patriots disembarked from the Buffalo, Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin, later to perish in the notorious quest for the Northwest Passage, was not certain how the Americans were to be treated. While he waited for clarification from faraway London, he sent them to work on the road gangs where, according to Snow, ‘Our work was a mile and a half from the station, and frequently was it our lot, to return to our huts this distance, through the cold and rain after a hard day’s toiling, and have to lay down for the night with our clothes drenched with water, and no fire allowed us to dry them.’
As for the French-Canadians in Sydney, the food in Van Diemen’s Land was cause for complaint: ‘I have seen men driven to the necessity of picking up potatoe [sic] skins and cabbage leaves, which they would boil and eat to quiet their hunger.’ There were failed escapes ending in sentences to Port Arthur, though the Americans were spared the usual floggings and hard labour suffered by ordinary convicts. Not everyone in the system agreed with this lenient approach, as Snow recalled:
Capt. Wright, our superintendent, who succeeded old Bobby Nutman, was an inhuman, overbearing, unprincipled, incarnate devil, he worked us incessantly, would not grant us the least favor if he could avoid it, and made his boast that ‘he would subdue that d-d independent Yankee spirit of ours if possible.’ If he succeeded in so doing, we have not yet learned the fact.
Eventually the Americans were separated and made to join the standard convict population where they all starved together. Snow found that ‘it seemed impossible for our new associates to live without stealing’ just to get enough to eat. If they were caught, the convicts were flogged and made to work in irons. Granted their tickets-of-leave, the Americans found themselves in an economy with little demand for labour. Some clubbed together and took over a farm, putting in a good crop and receiving a fine harvest. But the price of wheat and oats dropped and they came out with only a few pounds each, which was soon spent on necessities.
From 1844 the Americans received free pardons and ‘were at liberty to leave this country, to which none of us had formed attachments’. The men had to pay their own passages back to America but eventually, in January 1845, ‘we left the land with thankful hearts’ after five years and ‘could say with emphasis’:
Farewell, Van Dieman [sic], ruin’s gate,
With joy we leave thy shore;
And fondly hope our wretched fate,
Will drive us there no more.
The short life of William Westwood was wasted mostly in bondage—from most of which he continually escaped. He was born in Essex in 1820 and fell into crime from an early age, serving a year for highway robbery while still in his teens. Arriving in Sydney in July 1837, the seventeen-year-old, already scarred and tattooed, was to serve fourteen years for stealing a coat.
Assigned to Phillip Parker King’s property at Bungendore near modern-day Canberra, Westwood was poorly treated and starved by the overseer. He was convicted of stealing wheat in April the following year, serving six months before being returned to Bungendore. He ran away early in 1839 but was soon recaptured and flogged. In September 1840 he again escaped to become the ‘gentleman’ bushranger known as ‘Jackey-Jackey’. Westwood followed the outlaw hero code of courtesy to women and by not offering violence to his victims. He avoided capture and once stole enough money from a mail coach to live the high life in Sydney for a month without being caught. But in April 1841 he was tried at Berrima for some of his bushranging crimes and sentenced to transportation for life.
True to his Robin Hood image, Westwood escaped, even though he was wearing chains. His cool daring won grudging accolades in the colonial press, further gilding his reputation. Recaptured, he was sent to Cockatoo Island and then to Port Arthur. He made repeated attempts to escape but was apprehended and given floggings, solitary and hard labour for punishment. A reforming commandant of Port Arthur gave Westwood a chance to mend his ways. It worked for a while but he eventually fell back into crime. He was tried for being armed and illegally at large in 1845. The death sentence was commuted to transportation for life to Norfolk Island.
Here, in July 1846, the new commandant, concerned at what he considered the privilege of allowing prisoners their own cooking and eating implements, had them secretly removed. This was the last straw. William Barber was serving his sentence on Norfolk at that time and described what happened:
One of the principal causes which led to that fearful outbreak was the stoppage of the daily allowance of two pounds of potatoes, which, from the saltness of the beef, were in that hot climate almost absolutely necessary. Upon the failure of the potato crop, an equivalent for these two pounds of sweet potatoes was sought, and it was at length determined by the authorities that two ounces of raw salt pork, being exactly similar in money value, should be given as a substitute. The official report says: ‘This has created much dissatisfaction among the men generally, from the very small quantity, which could, with due regard to the public purse, be apportioned: and so difficult has it been to make the men comprehend the equity of such an equivalent, that a large number for a long time refused to receive it, in the hope that some other substitute would ultimately be granted them.’ The substitution of two ounces of pork for two pounds of potatoes was an exasperating mockery, which the men bore with patience until the sudden seizure of all their pots and cooking utensils, when an outbreak ensued, resulting in a fearful loss of life.
A special commission tried fourteen men for the massacre, including William Westwood. Most of them showed no repentance for their actions:
Some laughed and jested; others browbeat witnesses in a style quite professional, and, I presume, acquired in a long experience of courts of justice in England. One addressed the Court at considerable length, after having clearly examined the witnesses, speaking fluently and well, enumerating all the weak points in the evidence against him, and noting every discrepancy in the facts. This man was more deeply implicated than any, except Westwood. Another, an Irish lad of scarce twenty years of age, began his defence by calling a witness, whom, after a careful personal scrutiny, he dismissed without a question, professing ‘not to like the look of the fellow.’ Having called another witness, who described himself as a ‘scourger or flagellator’, much merriment ensued among the prisoners, and the Irish lad finally joked him out of the witness-box, and called another, with whom the following dialogue took place:
Prisoner. You’re Darker, I believe?
Witness. I am.
Prisoner. You’ve an extensive acquaintance on the island?
Witness. I know the men on the settlement mostly.
Prisoner. Divil doubt ye! It’s the big rogues is best known. Now, Darker, tell me. Didn’t ye some months ago say to a man on this island, that you had so much villainy in yir head, that it was a-busting out at yir ears?
Here the judge’s patience was exhausted, although such scenes are common on such occasions, and the witness was ordered to stand down.
Twelve of the accused convicts were found guilty. When they heard the death sentence, they became violent ‘cursing the prosecutor and all connected with the trial’. But Westwood remained calm and stood up to address the court in an ‘unbroken voice’:
He seemed contrite, but had lost none of that coolness and air of resolution, which had characterised him throughout. He expressed deep sorrow for his share in the massacre, sensible that he could say but little in extenuation of it. He expected to suffer, and was content to die, but regretted that innocent men should be involved in the punishment. It was observed, however, that he did not mention any names. He went on to say that he entered life with a kindly feeling towards his fellow-men, which had been changed into misanthropy by harsh treatment, fraud, and cruelty. ‘Since childhood’, he exclaimed, ‘I have never known what kindness was. I have struggled for liberty, and have robbed, when in the bush, to supply the cravings of nature but I never raised my hand against a fellow-creature till the present time.’
He complained bitterly of the harsh treatment he had received, not at Norfolk Island, but previously in Van Dieman’s [sic] Land. It was said by an officer on the Island that, in his case, there was some ground for the complaint; for he had heard that an act of brutality on the part of an overseer was the occasion of Westwood’s absconding and taking to those courses, which now…brought him to an ignominious end.
On the evening before his execution, Westwood wrote a letter to the religious instructor, Thomas Rogers:
Sir the strong ties of earth will soon be wrenched and the burning fever of this life will soon be quenched and my grave will be heavens resting place for me William Westwood. Sir out of the Bitter cup of misery I have drunk from my sixteenth year 10 long years, and the sweetest draught is that which takes away the misery of living death—it is the friend that deceives no man, all will then be quiet, no tyrant will disturb my repose I hope—Wm. Westwood.
The twelve ringleaders were hanged a few days later, together with five other convicts. The gallows were in such demand that they required the services of two hangmen, both convicts. They were selected from twenty or more enthusiastic convict volunteers for the grisly privilege: ‘One of the two men selected stated, in his written application, that having been a notorious offender and now deeply penitent for his past misconduct, he “hoped to be permitted to retrieve his character by serving the Government on the present occasion”.’
William ‘Jackey-Jackey’ Westwood was buried in unhallowed ground, the final punishment for executed felons. He was twenty-six years old. His legend as the ‘gentleman bushranger’ lived on among old hands and the general public for many years, though he is mostly forgotten today.
He wanders through the records of trials, floggings and bushranging. He serves hard time at many places, including Cockatoo Island, the Phoenix hulk in Sydney Harbour and Port Arthur. He is recalled in the odd convict memoir as ‘the poet’.
A swag of songs, poems and epigrams are attributed to Francis MacNamara, also known as ‘Frank the Poet’, many more than he probably composed. But he left his mark nevertheless and is today regarded as one of the great characters of convictism and as an early martyr of labour. Whether there was just one ‘Frank the Poet’ or if his legend is an amalgam of other similar figures with ready wits and quick tongues, we do not know. Perhaps it hardly matters. If no such person ever existed in the convict days, we would have invented him anyway.
Frank’s story begins in uncertainty. He may have hailed from Cork, Tipperary or Clare. He first comes to light in 1832 at his trial in Kilkenny for breaking a shop window and stealing some cloth. Defending himself, he cross-examined the arresting policemen and the shopkeeper:
Please your Wordship, as to Mr. Prince the constable, his oath should not be thought much against me. He may know the weight of that book in penny weights, but of the awful meaning and substance he knows nothing, often as he may have kissed it. He should have the eye of a hawk, and the vigilance of a cat, to see me do what he swears. By the virtue of your oath, young man, (to the shop man,) did you get directions from any persons as to what you were to swear against me.
The shopkeeper denied it, then Frank questioned the constable, who also denied the accusation. Frank turned mischievously to the magistrate, again intentionally mispronouncing his title:
Now your wordship, I must prove them both perjurers: did not that decent looking gentleman sitting under your wordship, in a loud and distinct manner, that no body could mistake, direct them to swear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
This did him no good, of course. Leaving the dock with the expected guilty verdict Frank waved his hand and declaimed loudly:
I dread not the dangers by land or by sea,
That I’ll meet on my voyage to Botany Bay;
My labours are over, my vocation is past,
And ’tis there I’ll rest easy and happy at last.
But Frank’s future was to be anything but easy and happy. Aboard the transport Eliza in June 1832 he was flogged for bad conduct, the officer responsible recognising his abilities as well as his failings:
Today gave MacNamara (one of the convicts) 2 dozen [lashes] for bad conduct. This fellow is a sad scamp and yet far above the common herd in some respects. He has considerable abilities, has written some very palpable lines on his trial and sentence since he came on board and has a very extensive knowledge of the Scriptures. He it appears was tried for a very slight offence but his conduct on his trial was so bad that he was transported for 7 years. He recited a mock heroic poem of his own composing in which he ridiculed judge jury and other officers of the Court that had tried him. This of course enhanced his offence and added to his punishment.
After disembarking, Frank continued his career of defiance and disruption. Over the next few years he served on an ironed gang on Goat Island, absconded several times, frequently disobeyed orders, refused to work and was found drunk in the cells, among other infringements. For these offences he was repeatedly flogged, worked in chains, placed in solitary confinement, and made to walk the treadmill. In 1842 he was captured with some other armed bushrangers and retransported for life to Van Diemen’s Land. He then went to Port Arthur with many other desperate re-offenders, including the famed bushranger Martin Cash, who later recollected Frank’s most famous introductory calling card:
My name is Francis MacNamara
A native of Cashell in the county Tipperary
Sworn tyranny’s foe
And while I’ve life I’ll crow.
As soon as he arrived Frank was involved in a convict strike against one of the typically cruel practices of overseers. The gang carrying bundles of wooden shingles was led by one convict with an extra light load. This man ran ahead while the rest of the gang, all with full loads, were made to keep up with him. Frank and the others who had just arrived from Sydney refused to play the game and only walked with their loads.
The overseer shouted for them to close up, but they took no notice of him, so that the other men were coming back for loads before they had reached the first resting place. We each had bundles of shingles to carry, and the Sydney men said, ‘Now, do you think these bundles are overweight?’ Some of them replied, ‘Yes’. They then emptied some of the shingles out, and tied them up again, so that by the time they had done that, the other men had been into the settlement with their loads. When they got into the settlement they were marched in front of the office, and the commandant came. The loads were weighed, and found to be underweight.
The commandant called for the triangle and the floggers and a clerk took down the names of the defiant convicts.
Amongst the rest there was the notorious Jackey Jackey, Frank the Poet, and Jones, and Cavanagh. There were upwards of thirty pairs of cats and four flagellators, and the surgeon, a young man named Dr Benson, who kept laughing and joking, and playing with his stick as unconcerned as though he was in a ballroom. When their names were taken, every other man was called out, and received thirty-six lashes. A fresh flagellator giving every twenty lashes, and they try to see who can give it the worst.
But the floggings had no effect. The next day the convicts again refused to run. ‘They were then ranked up, and all were flogged and sent to work again; the overseer still snapping at them and if they could have got him in the bush they would have killed him.’ On the third day, the same again. This time it was seven days solitary on bread and water. But when they came out and returned to work, the convicts’ resolve remained strong and they refused to run. Again they were hauled in front of the commandant. This time he listened to their complaint and ordered an end to the running treatment. A rare win over the system for the convicts.
It was in Port Arthur that Frank’s reputation among his peers was established. He managed to keep mostly out of trouble until 1847 when he was given a ticket-of-leave. He received a conditional pardon later that year and his Certificate of Freedom in 1849. In departing he gave his best-known verse nugget:
Land of lags and kangaroo,
Of possums and the scarce emu,
Squatter’s home and prisoner’s hell,
Land of Sodom, fare-thee-well.
A free man once again, Frank turns up next on the goldfields around Hill End, New South Wales.
Despite his strong start at Port Arthur, the horrors of the place finally broke his spirit and his body. People who knew him in the years leading to his death said he often coughed up blood. He died at the central-west New South Wales town of Mudgee in 1861. The examining doctor pronounced him dead of cold and malnourishment, diplomatically not mentioning the ravages of alcohol.
Frank’s many verses were well known among convicts and old lags, their defiance and sharp humour speaking strongly to their attitudes to authority and the system in general. In death his reputation grew. An obituary published shortly after his death by a man who knew him told the story of Frank’s assignment to a station up the country:
The first duty appointed him was to drive off the cockatoos from a paddock of newly sown grain. Frank performed this duty in the following provoking manner; he wrote out a number of threatening notices to the cockatoos, that they were prohibited from crossing the fence to the grain, and these notices he put at the tops of poles which he fastened at regular distances all round the paddock fences. When asked by the Super, what all those papers meant, he replied. ‘Did you not tell me to order the cockatoos off the ground?’
The legend of Frank the Poet did not take long to flower. He was previously known mainly among the ‘old hands’, his songs and verse transmitted orally and in handwritten form. Now his life and work were featured in newspapers in the years immediately following his death and he popped up in the published memories of ex-convicts, including Van Diemen’s Land bushranger Martin Cash. His work, rarely published in his lifetime, began to appear in newspapers and he even featured in a play about Martin Cash in 1900.
There are stories of other Irish convict poets. Some of these have probably blended with Frank’s potent legend as a witty but determined defier of the system. Historians calculate that he received nearly 600 lashes and endured many days in solitary during his time in various places of condemnation. Others suffered even more, but Frank’s ability to express the horrors of the system with his sharp wit made him a convict hero.