Convict Eliza James (Mrs Joseph Small), arrived on the Anna Maria in 1852. This photograph (possibly with her daughter) would have been taken after she had served her time and become a free woman.
This most flourishing colony suffered from the stain that had fallen upon it in its infancy…
Sir James Mackintosh in the House of Commons, 1828
They took Tom Tilley from Stafford to the hulks at the end of January 1786. He was bound for the unknown shores of New South Wales with a sentence of seven years for stealing, with force, some cloth and a bag valued at 21 shillings. Around this time, he commissioned an engraver to inscribe a small copper disc with a message to his loved ones, as was the custom. Tom Tilley’s handsome token read:
Thomas Tilley TRANSPORTED 29 July 1785 for signing a note Sent the hulks Jan 24 1786.
On the reverse side was a beautifully drawn bird shackled to the ground with a chain around its neck. The message to wife, sweetheart or family was clear. It was very unlikely that Tom, who was about forty years old, and the person or persons for whom his keepsake was meant would ever see each other again. Perhaps that was why he falsified his sentence from common thieving to the more sophisticated ‘writing a note’, or forging a document.
Accurate or not, love tokens, or ‘leaden hearts’ as they were often called, were frequently made for loved ones by departing convicts. Tom’s was well made and expensive, though most were crude scratchings on old coins, like Charles Wilkinson’s. He stole a handkerchief and was transported for life in 1824. The rough etchings on his token read:
Your lover lives for you
CL
Only.
Til death
The reverse of this token for the beloved ‘CL’ told the story in a few terse words:
C Wilkinson
Lag for Life
Aged 17
1824
Convicted of murder in 1832, William Kennedy was lucky to have his sentence cut to a lifetime of labour in the colonies. He had the engraver inscribe his coin with a defiant verse:
When this you see
Remember me
And bear me in your mind.
Let all the world
Say what they will
Speak of me as you find
There were no such emotive sentiments for Tom Tilley, and the end of one chapter in his life was the opening of another. The year before Tom was convicted, thirty-year-old Mary Abel (Abell) was convicted of grand larceny in Worcester. She, too, received a sentence of seven years transportation and was sent to the hulks awaiting what would be a long voyage with the First Fleet.
At some point while they were both on the hulks, Tom and Mary met and fell in love. Around August 1786 they conceived a child. William was born aboard the female transport Lady Penrhyn in April 1787. Tom sailed for the same destination aboard the Alexander.
William was baptised on 20 April 1787 aboard the Lady Penrhyn by the Reverend Richard Johnson and has the distinction of being the first entry in the New South Wales register of births, deaths and marriages.
The family arrived with the rest of the First Fleet in January 1788 and on 4 May they were married. Ten days later, young William died. Two months later, Mary was dead. Two years later, Tom married again. His new wife also came to the colony aboard the Lady Penrhyn. Oddly, her name was Elizabeth Tilley (also spelled Tully and no relation).
What happened to Tom and Elizabeth Tilley? Thomas is registered on a list of grants and leases of lands in the colony in 1794. Possibly they returned to England. Or perhaps they stayed on in the colony like most transports. Research to date has not revealed their fates. But through the accidents of history, Tom Tilley’s copper love token survived. In 1987 it came into the collection of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum where it is now preserved as a rare artefact of the First Fleet and a memorial to several convict lives.
On 26 January 1788, the convict armada of the First Fleet officially announced its presence on the continent of New Holland, as Australia was known at the time: ‘At Day light the English colours were displayed on shore & possession was taken for His Majesty whose health, with the Queens, Prince of Wales & Success to the Colony was drank, a feu de joie was fired by the party of marines & ye whole gave 3 cheers which was returned by the Supply.’
What is now Australia’s national day originated in the experiences of early colonial New South Wales, especially those who went there in chains. January 26 was being unofficially celebrated as the foundation or ‘First Landing Day’ of the colony of New South Wales by emancipated convicts and free settlers from at least 1808. Although not an official event, that year the festivities began at sundown on the 25th and continued well into the night with toasts, illuminated houses and bonfires. The first officer ashore in 1788, Major George Johnston, was the main toast of the evening. The next day Johnston arrested Governor Bligh, initiating the military coup that is since known as the ‘Rum Rebellion’. The first recorded observation of the day was born in controversy and conflict. Its history has often continued these themes up to the present day.
An interest in commemoration suggests that those involved had cause to bless rather than curse their experiences. They were free of their debt to society and were doing well in the colony. Certainly by 1817, although still unofficial, the observance of January 26 was decidedly respectable:
On Monday the 27th ult. a dinner party met at the house of Mr. Isaac Nichols, for the purpose of celebrating the Anniversary of the Institution of this Colony under Governor Philip, which took place on 26 Jan. 1788, but this year happening upon a Sunday, the commemoration dinner was reserved for the day following. The party assembled were select, and about 40 in number. At 5 in the afternoon dinner was on the table, and a more agreeable entertainment could not have been anticipated. After dinner a number of loyal toasts were drank, and a number of festive songs given; and about 10 the company parted, well gratified with the pleasures that the meeting had afforded.
The following year, 1818, Governor Macquarie declared the day an official celebration. Government employees were given the day off and an extra pound of fresh meat. A thirty-gun salute marked the years of the colony’s existence. The day was now known as ‘Foundation Day’ and continued to be observed as such, involving sporting traditions including sailing and horse racing.
The history of Australia Day since then has been one of increasing government involvement, some would say control, and increasing conflict over how the day should be observed or whether it should even be celebrated. In all this controversy, little mention is made of Australia Day’s convict origins.
It seemed to have gone well. The Janus left Cork in December 1819 with a cargo of 105 women, about a third of them Irish Catholics. There were twenty-six children and some passengers, including priests Philip Connelly and John Therry. Governor Macquarie contentedly reported the arrival of the transport Janus in May 1820:
This forenoon anchored in Sydney Cove the Ship Janus, Transport, Commanded by Capt. Thos. Jas. Mowatt, with 104 Female Convicts from England and Ireland, from which last Country She sailed on the 3d. of Decr. 1819, touching at Rio de Janeiro.—The Prisoners & other Passengers have arrived in good Health; but the Surgeon Supdt. Doctor Creagh—of the Royal Navy, died when the Ship had arrived off Van Diemen’s Land.—The Revd. Mr. Philip Connelly and The Revd. Mr. Josiah Terry [sic], Roman Catholic Priests, have come out Passengers in the Janus, with the Permission of Government, for the Ministry in this Colony.
But six weeks later one of the Janus women, Mary Long, complained that she had been impregnated by Captain Mowatt. Lydia Esden, also of the Janus, had the same complaint but she blamed the chief mate, John Hedges.
Macquarie wasted no time assembling a bench of magistrates to investigate. Witnesses were called. Some said they had seen no evidence of impropriety. But Connelly and Therry stated that there had been relationships between the sailors and the female convicts from the start of the voyage. And it was not just the sailors, the women ‘were as determined to communicate with the sailors as they themselves were’. In response to a complaint from the priests, new locks had been placed on the convicts’ quarters when the ship reached Rio de Janeiro. But these were deemed to be ineffective in preventing continuing intercourse.
Captain Mowatt defended himself strongly, claiming that Father Connelly was trying ‘to represent as blameless all those of his own persuasion’. Attention turned to the role of the surgeon, Dr Creagh, who was also implicated in the alleged wrongdoing. A part of his role was to maintain proper relations aboard the ship, which, according to Mowatt, he failed to do.
There were clearly a number of tensions aboard the Janus that run through the accounts given to the magistrates. But the evidence of Lydia Esden and Mary Long was convincing and the bench concluded that:
[We] are of the opinion that Prostitution did prevail on board the said Ship throughout the Voyage from England to this Territory; that due exertions were not made on the part of the Captain and officers to prevent the same; and that the matter of Charge, as against the Captain and Officers of the said Ship individually in that respect, is true and well founded in fact.
Despite this finding, there seems to have been no consequences for the men involved. The Janus sailed away with Mowatt in command the following July to go whaling off New Zealand. She eventually returned to England without revisiting Sydney.
This was not the first allegation of prostitution and immoral behaviour aboard convict ships. The Lady Juliana was the first transport to carry female-only convicts, more than 220 of them. She arrived as part of the Second Fleet after a voyage of more than 300 days. She had spent more than seven months in port preparing to sail, plenty of time for those aboard to get to know each other very well. According to the steward John Nicol, when the ship got to sea ‘every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath’. Nicol also struck up a relationship with a convict woman, as did the ship’s surgeon.
Some historians have subscribed to the theory that the Lady Juliana was ‘a floating brothel’, as first proposed by historian Charles Bateson. Others point out that the women were free to make whatever relationships they chose and that there is no evidence of coercion or commerce in their arrangements. Relatively few transported women had records of prostitution, despite the views of some contemporaries, most floridly expressed in officer Ralph Clark’s view of the Second Fleet women as ‘those damned whores’. Almost all records surviving are from the point of view of the upper classes who generally saw working-class women as morally degenerate because they often lived in de facto relationships. Not the same as prostitution, of course, but subtlety and precision were not strong qualities of Georgian and Victorian social interactions.
There were frequent similar claims made about illicit sexual relations aboard convict ships, consensual or not. These certainly took place, though were much amplified by gossip stemming from the prejudices of the time. Perceptions and misperceptions like this would continue throughout the colonial era. They became a potent element in the notion of ‘the convict stain’ and, despite the efforts of historians to present a more balanced view, are still strong elements of the mythology of convictism.
In the House of Commons on 20 June 1828, Sir James Mackintosh rose to speak and argued for the establishment of trial by jury and a limited form of elected assembly in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, ‘except the penal settlement for offenders’. He saw no reason why:
The inhabitants of an English colony, which had subsisted for forty years and which had grown to such magnitude, should be denied by the parent country those two great institutions of popular judicature by juries and popular legislating by their representatives, the chief boast and honour of the English race, who had preserved them under all circumstances and held them up as a model to all other nations? (Cheers).
Mackintosh went on to point out that such institutions were desirable:
because this most flourishing colony suffered from the stain that had fallen upon it in its infancy, and which induced many persons yet to consider it as the receptacle of convicts. The only measure that could wipe out this stain was to impart the privileges of British subjects to the colonists, and put them on a footing with all other parts of the British empire, by proclaiming that they had the same rights and privileges as their countrymen in the other quarters of the world. (Cheers).
The ‘convict stain’ was declared. The only way to purge the Australian colonies of this dreadful blemish was to plant the institutions of English law, rewarding the hard-working ‘freedman’ (Macquarie liked the good old word better than ‘emancipist’) who had ‘acquired property by his industry the power to elect a representative, and to be a juryman as a reward for his virtues’.
This point of view came from the increasing numbers of free settlers and ex-convicts, or ‘emancipists’ as they were known, in the colonies. The idea that the flowering new nation William Wentworth foresaw in his 1823 poem, ‘Australasia—A New Britannia in another world’, had its origins in something as morally, legally and now politically rancid as convicted felons was an increasing embarrassment.
This was not new. Doubts of one kind or another had been aired about the entire Australian penal enterprise even before the First Fleet sailed. But forty years later it was a central element of the fight to end transportation that came to a head in the 1840s and saw its abolition in New South Wales and later in the rebranded Van Diemen’s Land, now ‘Tasmania’.
Evermore lurid revelations of the horrors of the convict system, usually coded as ‘unnatural crime’, featured in reports, inquiries and in the pages of the lively colonial press. Many of these accounts were also published in the British newspapers and journals. People became reluctant to advertise a convict connection, whether it was their own misdemeanour or that of an ancestor. The original sin of convictism was washed away by a growing silence.
The convict stain became even more closely associated with the foundations of Australia in the term ‘birth stain’, an explicit slur that has echoed down the decades. Even with the current popularity of researching convict ancestors, the stain continues to influence the way we think about convictism and its role in our past. While a convict ancestor is now considered by many to be something of a social distinction, the broader story of transportation has suffered a great forgetting of the 160,000 or more women, men, children and adolescents who founded modern Australia.
Charles Hodge, apprentice, was well liquored when he visited Mr Cherrington’s place of business in Pitt Street one Sunday afternoon in 1841. With ‘a cigar stuck in his mouth’, Hodge became ‘very insolent and pretended to be looking out for a coat to purchase’. Mr Cherrington summoned a constable and the troublesome apprentice was taken in custody and remanded until his master, Mr Bibb, could be contacted.
When Mr Bibb arrived he told the magistrate that his young charge ‘had of late connected himself with what was popularly and well known as the “Cabbage Tree Mob” and since then he had become exceedingly saucy and would not demean himself as an apprentice ought to do’. He asked the magistrate to let Charles know what would be the consequences of associating with such ‘disorderly characters’. The magistrate obliged, saying:
He was sorry to hear anything said against the native youth of the Colony, because he was aware that there were many things in their favor, and many excellent traits in their character; but of late he had been frequently called upon to deal with some of them for conduct at once improper, and highly discreditable to one and all of those concerned in the disturbances, and he was determined in future to inflict the severest penalty on every one convicted before him; he also wished the prisoner distinctly to understand, that if ever his master brought him to Court for keeping irregular hours, or if he should even be apprehended in the company of those boys, he had improperly associated himself with, he would send him to the house of correction for a very long period, as it was not to be endured that the public peace was to be disturbed by any class of disorderly persons, and least of all by boys. If therefore, the prisoner consulted his own safety or respectability, he would instantly change his companions and keep good hours.
With this stern talking-to, Charles Hodge was discharged.
The ‘Cabbage Tree Mob’ he had taken up with was a general term of the time for troublesome bands of youth. Roaming the streets of Sydney and wearing their trademark cabbage tree hats, a colonial invention, they became increasingly difficult to control. Many of what the magistrate called ‘the native youth’ were the sons of convicts, also sometimes known as ‘currency lads’. Their attitude to authority perhaps owed something to their ancestry and something to the restlessness that has always energised juvenile street gangs. A contemporary described them around the 1840s, when the term ‘cabbage tree mob’ first seems to arise:
There are to be found round the doors of the Sydney theatre a sort of ‘loafers’, known as the Cabbage-tree mob—a class whom, in the spirit of the ancient tyrant, one might excusably wish had but one nose, in order to make it a bloody one! These are an unruly set of young fellows, native born generally, who, not being able, perhaps, to muster coin enough to enter the house, amuse themselves by molesting those who can afford that luxury. Dressed in a suit of fustian or colonial tweed, and the emblem of their order, the low-crowned cabbage-palm hat, the main object of their enmity seems to be the ordinary black headpiece worn by respectable persons, which is ruthlessly knocked over the eyes of the wearer as he passes or enters the theatre.
The children of this generation would become the larrikins who caused so much trouble in Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere later in the century.
Visitors to the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart can buy a colourful postcard showing a scene in the history of that institution. The popular souvenir depicts a group of convict women baring their bottoms at three dignitaries. The caption is ‘A Singular Act of Female Rebellion in Van Diemen’s Land’.
The story goes that Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin and Lady Franklin were visiting the factory one Sunday to join the colony’s chaplain who was delivering a sermon to the inmates. The visitors were positioned in front of 300 or so convict women, all taking the word of the Lord together. At some point in the proceedings, the convict women turned their backs to the dignitaries before them, lifted their skirts and slapped their bare behinds in a gesture of unmistakeable meaning.
The postcard shows this marvellous moment of class defiance and the shock on the faces of the Franklins and the cleric. But, sadly, it never happened. The postcard was created in 2004 and the group mooning is just a myth, originating in the addled spleen of a disappointed Anglican priest named Robert Crooke.
Crooke came to the colony with the aim of becoming the chaplain, a secure position. Through his own failings he was unsuccessful and left the island under a cloud in 1858. He spent the rest of his life castigating the Anglican Church in Tasmania, most especially the chaplain who, Crooke, believed, held the job that should have belonged to him. The flashing bottoms story was a piece of fantasy that Crooke confected in his ignored writings.
But two generations later, Crooke’s granddaughter showed her grandfather’s rantings to a biographer of Sir John Franklin who unwittingly included the bottom-baring incident as fact. Like all such believable untruths, especially a vulgar one, it went on to have a life of its own as ‘history’. It still does, despite historians trying for years to debunk it. In vain do they point to the demonising of the convict women as they appear in the very popular postcard.
No matter how often the myth is busted, it just keeps rolling on. This, of course, is how we have all been encouraged to see convict women through decades of popular novels, stories, television and even some histories. The defiance of authority implicit in the story and the postcard make it even more appealing to the strong streak of anti-authoritarianism in the national identity. That is a myth, too, which just makes it even more powerful.
The Golden Grove was one of the First Fleet store ships, sometimes called ‘the Noah’s Ark of Australia’ due to the number and variety of livestock she conveyed to Botany Bay, including: ‘one bull, four cows, and one calf; one stallion, three mares, and three colts; one ram, eleven sheep, and eight lambs; one billy-goat, four nanny goats, and three kids; one boar, five sows, and a litter of 14 pigs; nine different sorts of dogs; and seven cats.’
In the 1870s it was said that one of these First Fleet cats was still living at the amazing age of 100 at the New South Wales town of Gundagai. The centenarian moggy was so aloof she would only eat pork sausages. By the 1920s, the feline was said to have reached the even more advanced age of 190 years. This assertion was published in at least one English newspaper and picked up and reprinted in the American and Australian press. While the Americans swallowed the tale whole, the factoid was properly dismissed by Gundagai locals as what in those days was called a ‘mare’s nest’, meaning a grossly inaccurate claim, or what we might today call an urban legend or just fake news.
By then, of course, Gundagai was famous for the dog that sat on the tuckerbox in the folksong known as ‘Nine Miles from Gundagai’:
I’m used to punching bullock teams across the hills and plains,
I’ve teamed outback these forty years in blazing droughts and rains,
I’ve lived a heap of troubles down without a blooming lie,
But I can’t forget what happened to me nine miles from Gundagai.
’Twas getting dark the team got bogged the axle snapped in two,
I lost my matches and my pipe ah what was I to do,
The rain came on twas bitter cold and hungry too was I,
And the dog sat in the tucker box nine miles from Gundagai.
Some blokes I know have stacks of luck no matter how they fall,
But there was I lord luvva duck no blessed luck at all,
I couldn’t make a pot of tea nor get my trousers dry,
And the dog sat in the tucker box nine miles from Gundagai.
I can forgive the blinking team I can forgive the rain,
I can forgive the dark and cold and go through it again,
I can forgive my rotten luck but hang me till I die,
I can’t forgive that blooming dog nine miles from Gundagai.
But that’s all dead and past and gone I’ve sold the team for meat,
And where I got the bullocks bogged now there is an asphalt street,
The dog ah well he took a bait and reckoned he would die,
I buried him in that tucker box nine miles from Gundagai.
By then, the dog had become so famous for whatever it actually did in the tuckerbox that the good folk of Gundagai had erected a statue to its folkloric memory. Cat yarns, no matter how foundational, were not welcome.
The transported convicts who lived and died in many parts of Australia remain with us in various ways. As well as the many heritage sites associated with jails, bridges and other public works built by convict labour, they have also bequeathed us a great many ghost stories.
George Grover was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1825. His record shows that he was at first considered a troublemaker and spent a lot of time in irons, the usual punishment for mild insubordination. But by 1829 he revelled in the official title of ‘Flagellator at Richmond’. The famous stone bridge was undergoing renovations and Grover is said to have made himself unpopular with the convicts by riding on the hand-drawn carts of stone and whipping the convicts along like beasts.
One foggy night in March 1832, the Richmond Flagellator visited a local farm for a drinking session. According to witnesses he left the party in a well-oiled state. At two o’clock that morning a constable found Grover broken and barely alive on the rocks beneath the Richmond Bridge. Grover died and four men were accused of throwing him over the edge of the bridge, 8 metres above the rocks below. The official verdict was that Grover had accidentally fallen to his death while intoxicated, though few probably believed that to be true. Since then his ghost has been reported roaming the bridge on foggy nights, searching to revenge himself on his killers.
And he has a furry ghost friend, at least according to popular belief. A large black dog has been seen prowling the bridge from time to time. The beast appears, walks to the end of the bridge, then vanishes. Often the dog helpfully escorts people across the bridge. Although often called ‘Grover’s Dog’, this ghostly canine does not seem to match the dog allegedly kept by Grover the Flagellator until he met his unpleasant end beneath Richmond bridge. There are various versions of the story; one claims that Grover had a vicious mongrel dog but it was black and white in colour.
Richmond is also the location of Australia’s oldest surviving jail, built by convicts from 1825. Like all places of penance in the convict system, it was a place of misery, degradation and violence. For some, that dark past is etched into the stone walls. There have been reports of moaning and sighing within the buildings and one of the cells is said to terrify some people who enter it. Many do. The jail is now a popular tourist attraction where visitors can see and visit solitary confinement cells, the chain gang holding room, the cook house, the flogging yard and the privy, or toilet.
Another famous flagellator has lived on after death. In this case not a convict but one of the jailers. Captain Logan was commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement from 1826. He was an efficient but cruel man who was universally hated by the convicts unlucky enough to come under his control. Logan’s favoured method of punishment was ‘the triangle’, rudely fashioned of three pieces of wood. Those sentenced to a flogging were spread-eagled across the structure, ensuring a full spread of the flogger’s lash across their bodies. It is said that many did not leave the triangle alive.
Logan’s dark legend lived on not only in the famous convict ballad usually known as ‘Moreton Bay’ or ‘The Convict’s Lament’ but also in the supernatural. Two ghost stories are told of the captain’s life and death.
Riding home alone from one of his frequent mapping explorations into the bush, Logan saw a convict on the bush track that ran through what is now South Brisbane. Suspecting the man was escaping, Logan commanded him to stop. The man did as he was ordered but then turned and came towards the captain. When he got close enough he grabbed hold of a stirrup. Logan thrashed at the man with his riding crop but to his horror the crop went right through the convict. Frightened, Logan urged his horse into a gallop. But the apparition held tightly to his stirrup until he reached the Brisbane River, then vanished.
Relieved but unsettled, Logan realised that he knew the identity of his shadowy assailant and why he had been assaulted. A month or so earlier, a convict named Stimson escaped and was recaptured and flogged on Logan’s triangle where he died in agony. The place where he was recaptured was exactly the same spot where Logan encountered the spectre.
But the tale does not end there. At midday on 18 October 1830, a gang of convicts was working along the river bank when they noticed the commandant waving as he rode along the other side of the river. Assuming he was asking to be ferried across, a couple of convicts rowed the punt across the river to pick him up. When they got there, Logan had unaccountably disappeared. They later learned that the commandant had been murdered, probably by Aborigines, in the early hours of that morning and 70 kilometres away. The spot on the Brisbane River bank where the convicts had seen him riding was the same place Logan previously encountered the shade of Stimson.
There are few convict locations without some supernatural associations. Port Arthur is troubled with many unnatural sights and sounds, as is the Old Hobart Gaol. Troubling shades of convicts past are seen or felt in Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks and many colonial sites throughout New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland. The especially grim history of Norfolk Island is rich with sad stories, and Aboriginal spirits are restless on Rottnest Island. The telling and retelling of these tales link the dark days of the convict past to our present.
There were several reasons why a young farm worker in mid-nineteenth century Oxfordshire might set fire to a haystack. An accident. Youthful folly. Or payback for real or imagined wrongdoing by the farmer. Firing a farmer’s property was often revenge for real or imagined injustices. Samuel Speed was convicted of this crime in 1863 and sent to Western Australia for seven years.
He was still there in 1938. Almost one hundred years of age, he was interviewed by a journalist from the Perth Mirror in the Old Men’s Home, built on the site of the Mt Eliza Convict Depot. Samuel’s memory was a bit foggy, but he gave a good account of his experiences as the only known survivor of Australia’s convict system to that time, the last expiree.
Samuel arrived in what was then the colony of Swan River in 1866 aboard the transport Belgravia. ‘Among those unfortunates transported, he recalls, were men in every walk of life; doctors, lawyers, shirt-soiled gentlemen and social outcasts tipped together in the pot-house of humanity that was the Swan River Colony.’
In his early to mid-twenties, Samuel was to experience a penal system from which many of the old evils had been purged: ‘Vividly Sam Speed recalls the trip out on the Belgravia. The waiting on the hulks at Chatham was an awful time. “Whatever stories you hear”, he said, “the officers were pretty good to us. We had plenty of food, and my back bears no lash marks today”.’
Samuel made up his mind early to be an exemplary prisoner. ‘He kept free of the trouble many of the hot-heads ran into.’ He was proud of the fact that he had no black marks against his name from the time he stepped ashore at Fremantle and had never been flogged. So good was his conduct that he was made a bondsman after three years, allowing him to live and work in the colony, effectively as a free man. He worked for a number of settler families and on the building of the first wooden bridge over the Swan River at Fremantle: ‘And now they’re telling me it’s being pulled down for a new one. Let’s hope they make as good a job of it as we did in those days.’
He remembered the escape of the Irish Fenians aboard the American whaler, Catalpa, in 1876 and knew the escapee and bushranger Moondyne Joe: ‘knew of his dramatic escape to the bush around Bunbury; knew of the fruitless hue and cry that was raised by the prison authorities. But “Moondyne Joe” got clear away.’
Despite his age, the chirpy Samuel was considered by the home’s attendants to be as ‘lively as a two-year-old’. They said that when his bath was ready ‘he jumps in and out as nimbly as though he were getting ready to go courting again’. Asked if he ever married, Sam replied: ‘Marry? Me, marry! Not on your life, not with all the girls chasing me like they used to. I was a regular “nineteen-er”.’ [wicked]
Samuel’s sentence was up in 1871, at which time he became a completely free man, an ‘expiree’. Nearly seventy years later, perhaps it was a busy love life that kept him hale and hearty. Or perhaps it was that Samuel Speed, last of the convicts and arsonist, ‘never smoked in his life’.