Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station
Record keeping was important in a place where so many things went missing. One of John Douglas’s tasks was to account for every prisoner at the settlement in black and white. Each quarter he made out a detailed list of each man and woman upon the station, noting the day they had arrived and the length of time they had been ordered to serve. He compiled lists of absconders, recording those who got clean away from the settlement and those who returned half starved to death or had been brought back under the charge of the military.
The record he kept made grim reading. According to this official history, 93 per cent of all escapes ended in the death of the convict. Some were thought to have been murdered by their comrades, others to have drowned, or been speared by the Mimegin, Peternidic, or one of the other bands of Aboriginal peoples who moved up and down the coast. A few were shot by soldiers sent in pursuit, but mostly they were presumed to have starved to death in the bush. Despite this the convicts at Macquarie Harbour continued to seek to defy the confident pronouncements that declared escape from the place to be nigh on impossible. At times so many absconded that they pushed the capacity of the military to its limits and kept Douglas’s quill busy, scrawling reports of each escape and recapture.
The large number of prisoners who had been sent to the settlement for running compounded the issue. Macquarie Harbour was seen as the place of choice to send those who had attempted to bust out of other penal settlements. Over the course of the 1820s, at least 114 runaways from other penal stations in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were despatched there as this was a place from which escape was ‘never accomplished without loss of life, either by perishing in the woods, or by some other miserable end’. This was of course an allusion to the grisly fate that had befallen those who had attempted to escape with Alexander Pearce. It was, as the Hobart Town Gazette put it, a fitting place to banish ‘notorious and abandoned characters’.
It was a view that was shared by many others in colonial Australia. It was considered that the ‘rugged, closely wooded, and altogether impracticable country’ would ensure that prisoners exiled there would be kept to hard labour for the term of their sentence. Even British parliamentarians knew that to attempt to escape from Macquarie Harbour was folly in the extreme.
When John Barnes had served as colonial assistant surgeon at Macquarie Harbour he had acquired a copy of the list of absconders kept by Douglas. Later when the surgeon had returned to London, he was called as a witness before the Molesworth Committee, charged with investigating the continued efficacy of transporting convicts to Australia. Barnes furnished the committee with the piece of paper drawn up by Douglas and the return was duly printed in the papers and proceedings of the British Parliament. The committee closely questioned the former assistant colonial surgeon. Why was it, they wanted to know, that prisoners continued to attempt to run from the settlement when the fate of those who had tried to effect their escape was so well established? Barnes explained that ‘there were constantly rumours coming by fresh batches of convicts, that such and such a party of men who had left the settlement at such a time, had made their escape from Launceston or Hobart Town, or some place that the ships visit’. Indeed, he confessed that the ‘impression which convicts at Macquarie Harbour had was, that the greater part of those who had absconded and were not heard of, had made their way to some settled part of the country’.
There is a certainty in written lists: once cast on to paper a thing takes on the illusion of fact. The fact was, however, that the administration had no idea what had happened to the runaways who had slipped into the blank sections of the map and had never been apprehended. The aim of the list was to pronounce the absconder as dead and the escape as failed. It was literally a paperwork exercise that sought to traffic in the bodies of escaped prisoners—moving them from a figurative column labelled ‘success’ to an inked column labelled ‘dead’. It was a literary trick that may have worked with commandants, surgeons, lieutenant governors and parliamentarians, but it had little effect on the rank and file condemned to life in a penal station. As Commandant Butler confirmed, the prisoners believed every little rumour that filtered back to circulate among their ranks. It turned out, however, that it was not just the map that had blank sections on it. There were prisoners marked as perished on Douglas’s list who survived their sojourn in the bush to turn up alive and kicking elsewhere.
When it came to breaking out of the place, those who had been sent to the settlement for absconding played a prominent role. They accounted for half of the participants in all Macquarie Harbour escape attempts although they represented less than a third of the convict population. Many were seasoned campaigners who had previously spent many months in the bush. Among those who had been sent to the settlement for absconding from Port Macquarie in New South Wales were men who had walked over 100 miles ‘subsisting on such garbage as they could pick up’. By the time they were apprehended some were ‘covered in scabs from top to toe, having endured extreme hardships’. Such men did not need Mr Douglas’s list to inform them of the odds stacked against the runaway. When it came to weighing their chances in the bush, they did not employ the logic of an accountant. However remote the probability of shaking off the shackles of convict life, the belief that this might be possible outweighed all that might otherwise be said against the venture. ‘It was’, as one said, ‘impossible to give an idea of the hardships and misery’ which were suffered at a place like Macquarie Harbour and many, rather than endure it, would go to extreme lengths. As he continued, he felt himself ‘as it were shut out forever from society, and utterly wretched’ and it was in this miserable state that ‘he determined to brave everything in order to put an end’ to his present suffering. He was filled, as he put it, with an ‘uncontrollable desire’ to run.
