The Fatal Shore Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The Fatal shore

  “Exciting, revealing, compulsively readable … History at its best.”

  —Newsday

  “[Mr. Hughes] has felt his way back into the past with passion and insight, mined an enormous mass of material and welded the results of his researches into a commanding narrative.… Already widely known as an art critic, he now reveals his formidable gifts as a social historian.”

  —The New York Times

  “Although The Fatal Shore is both lengthy and scholarly, it is also fun to read. One of Hughes’s greatest gifts as a journalist has always been his ability to express serious themes in accessible language. In his marvelous new history, he brings convict Australia to life both in his own words and those of its inhabitants.… The idiosyncratic voices of the individual convicts he quotes imbue the narrative with the spark and savor of real life in all its chaotic, intimate detail. This kind of history is as exciting and entertaining as a good novel.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Extraordinarily vivid … A work of real distinction … An extraordinarily vivid yet authentic account of the birthpangs of a nation.”

  —PHILIP ZIEGLER

  “Hughes’s prose style is an exhilarating combination of appetite and invective, wordliness and idealism, scholarship and sensuality.”

  —New York

  “An enthralling account of the convict settlement of Australia, thoroughly researched and excellently written, brimming over with rare and pungent characters, and tales of pathos, bravery, and horror—a remarkable history, and a great and terrible pageant, full of life and death.”

  —PETER MATTHIESSEN

  “Written with the passion and comprehensive view that its mighty subject demands: an impressive, harrowing, and historic book.”

  —SHIRLEY HAZZARD

  ALSO BY ROBERT HUGHES

  The Art of Australia (1966)

  Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1969)

  The Shock of the New (1981)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, February 1988

  Copyright © 1986 by Robert Hughes

  Maps copyright © 1986 by Raphael Palacios

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, in Great Britain by William Collins PLC and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1986.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hughes, Robert, 1936–

  The fatal shore.

  1. Australia—History—1788–1900.

  2. Australia—Exiles—History.

  3. Penal colonies—Australia—History.

  I. Title.

  [DU115.H78 1988] 994 87-40089

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81560-6

  v3.1

  For my godson

  ALEXANDER BLIGH TURNBULL, B. 1982

  a seventh-generation Australian

  and for my son’s godparents

  ALAN MOOREHEAD, 1910–1983

  LUCY MOOREHEAD, 1908–1979

  che ’n la mente m’e fìtta, e or m’accora,

  la cara e buona imagine paterna

  di voi …

  e quant’io l’abbia in grado, mentr’io vivo,

  convien che nella mia lingua si scerna.

  —Dante, Inferno, XV, 82–87

  I have been studying how I may compare

  This prison where I live unto the world:

  And, for because the world is populous,

  And here is not a creature but myself,

  I cannot do it;—yet I’ll hammer’t out.

  —Shakespeare, Richard II, V. v.

  The very day we landed upon the Fatal Shore,

  The planters stood around us, full twenty score or more;

  They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,

  They chained us up to pull the plough, upon Van Diemen’s Land.

  —Convict ballad, ca. 1825–30.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Maps

  1 The Harbor and the Exiles

  2 A Horse Foaled by an Acorn

  3 The Geographical Unconscious

  4 The Starvation Years

  5 The Voyage

  6 Who Were the Convicts?

  Photo Insert

  7 Bolters and Bushrangers

  8 Bunters, Mollies and Sable Brethren

  9 The Government Stroke

  10 Gentlemen of New South Wales

  11 To Plough Van Diemen’s Land

  12 Metastasis

  Photo Insert

  13 Norfolk Island

  14 Toward Abolition

  15 A Special Scourge

  16 The Aristocracy Be We

  17 The End of the System

  Appendix 1: Governors and Chief Executives of New South Wales, 1788–1855

  Appendix 2: Chief Executives of Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–53

  Appendix 3: Secretaries of State for the Colonies, 1794–1855

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Illustrations follow this page and this page.

  Introduction

  THE IDEA for this book occurred to me in 1974, when I was working on a series of television documentaries about Australian art. On location in Port Arthur, among the ruins of the great penitentiary and its outbuildings, I realized that like nearly all other Australians I knew little about the convict past of my own country.

  I grew up with a skimpy sense of colonial Australia. Convict history was ignored in schools and little taught in universities—indeed, the idea that the convicts might have a history worth telling was foreign to Australians in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the mid-1970s only one general history of the System (as transportation, assignment and secondary punishment in colonial Australia were loosely called) was in print: A. G. L. Shaw’s pioneering study Convicts and the Colonies. An unstated bias rooted deep in Australian life seemed to wish that “real” Australian history had begun with Australian respectability—with the flood of money from gold and wool, the opening of the continent, the creation of an Australian middle class. Behind the bright diorama of Australia Felix lurked the convicts, some 160,000 of them, clanking their fetters in the penumbral darkness. But on the feelings and experiences of these men and women, little was written. They were statistics, absences and finally embarrassments.

  This sublimation has a long history; the desire to forget about our felon origins began with the origins themselves. To call a convict a convict in early colonial Australia was an insult certain to raise colonial hackles. The approved euphemism was “Government man.” What the convict system bequeathed to later Australian generations was not the sturdy, skeptical independence on which, with gradually waning justification, we pride ourselves, but an intense concern with social and political respectability. The idea of the “convict stain,” a moral blot soaked into our fabric, dominated all argument about Australian selfhood by the 1840s and was the main rhetorical figure used in the movement to abolish transportation. Its leaders called for abolition, not in the name of an independent Australia, but as Britons who felt their decency impugned by the survival of convictry. They were transplanted Britons but Britons still, plus royalistes que la reine. The first signs of Australian social identity had appeared as early as the 1820s among the “Currency lads and lasses,” most of whom were native-born children of former convicts. In the name of abolitio
n, this picture had to be severely edited in the 1840s; and for decades to come, the official voices of Australia would continue to stake their claim to respectability on their Britishness. If the end of transportation had been brought about in the name of the convicts’ own descendants, this might not have happened. But the fight was on behalf of free emigrants and their stock; it was this side of Australia which most fervently brandished the myth of corrupted blood and “convict evil.” After abolition, you could (silently) reproach your forebears for being convicts. You could not take pride in them, or reproach England for treating them as it did. The cure for this excruciating colonial double bind was amnesia—a national pact of silence. Yet the Stain would not go away: the late nineteenth century was a flourishing time for biological determinism, for notions of purity of race and stock, and few respectable native-born Australians had the confidence not to quail when real Englishmen spoke of their convict heritage.

  Thus local imperialists, who believed that Australia could only survive as a vassal of Great Britain, held that the solvent for the Birth Stain was blood—as much of it as England needed for her wars. Below the propaganda of the Boer War and World War I, voices (usually working-class, and commonly Irish) were heard “unpatriotically” pointing out that, having been shipped out of Britain as criminals, we were shipped back as cannon fodder; so that, when peace came, the survivors could return to their real mission as Australians—growing cheap wool and wheat for England. But to dwell on the Stain did not promote that sense of national dignity which, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers believed, got the lads over the wire. Amnesia seemed to be a condition of patriotism, and this pervaded attitudes toward the writing and teaching of Australian history, at least up to the appearance of the first volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia in 1962. One of the reasons why Australians after 1918 embraced with such deep emotion the mythic event of Gallipoli, our Thermopylae, was that there seemed to be so little in our early history to which we could point with pride. “History” meant great men, stirring deeds, useful discoveries and worthy sacrifices; our history was short of these. This made us even more anxious about our worth as Australians living in Australia—the root of the “Cultural Cringe” which would continue to plague us until long after World War II. The idea that whether or not England should feel ashamed of creating the System, Australians certainly had cause to be proud of surviving it and of creating their own values despite it, was rarely heard.

  Australian historians up until the 1960s succumbed to this pressure; hence the textbooks’ silence about convictry. It was as though some collective delicacy in American historians had persuaded them to play down the Civil War, so as not to open old wounds.

  Denied its voice as history, convict experience became the province of journalists and novelists. The general public never lost its curiosity about these “dark” years in which so many of its roots lay tangled; and a vivid, trashy Grand Guignol, long on rum, sodomy and the lash but decidedly short on the more prosaic facts about how most convicts actually lived and worked, sprang up to supply its demands. So did one national novel, that powerful, meandering awkwardly framed and passionately felt magnum opus of Marcus Clarke’s, For the Term of His Natural Life. All the popular literature of transportation focussed on the horrors of the System, the outer penal settlements to which recidivists were condemned—Port Arthur, Macquarie Harbor, Moreton Bay and, especially, Norfolk Island. It presented convict life as a wretched purgatory, relieved only by stretches of pure hell.

  This folklore of the System kept its memory alive. But it was one-sided and, especially in its treatment of Port Arthur, sometimes luridly exaggerated. It did not bother with the general experience of convicts. Only a fraction of the men and women transported to Australia spent any time in these “secondary” settlements, which were as a rule reserved for prisoners who had committed second crimes while in the colony. Most served a few years of their sentences in assignment to a free settler or in Government labor, never wore chains, got their tickets-of-leave and in due course were absorbed into colonial society as free citizens. Most of them (if one can judge by the surviving letters) wanted to stay in Australia and rejected the idea of going back to England.

  For assignment worked. Despite all its imperfections and injustices, and the abuses of bad masters and the general harshness of antipodean life, it did give a fresh start to many thousands of people who would have been crushed in spirit or confirmed in crime by long stretches in an English prison. And, despite the number of bigots in our grandfathers’ day deriding Australians as the children of criminals, remarkably few Australians pointed out the obvious contrary fact that, whatever other conclusions one might draw from our weird national origins, the post-colonial history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a community of people, handpicked over decades for their “criminal propensities” and for no other reason, whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world. At a time when neo-conservative social idealogues are trying to revive the old bogey of hereditary disposition to crime, this may still be worth pondering.

  From the 1960s onward, when Australian historians—inspired, though slowly at first, by Manning Clark’s History of Australia and L. L. Robson’s The Convict Settlers of Australia (1965)—began to draw the System out of folklore and into the light of inquiry, they focussed on the majority of convicts: those in assignment, not those on Norfolk Island. It was from them, not from the double-damned incorrigibles, that one could learn the actual workings of colonial society, the often-exotic ways in which convicts claimed rights and functioned as a class in relation to the free. Colonial Australia was unique in its mingling of the free and the bond, in its attitudes toward work and its definitions of servitude. It was also a more “normal” place than one might imagine from the folkloric picture of a society governed by the lash and the triangle, composed of groaning white slaves tyrannized by ruthless masters. The book that best conveys this, and has rightly become a landmark in recent studies of the System, is J. B. Hirst’s Convict Society and its Enemies (1983).

  Though Hirst and other “normalizing” historians have not ignored the lower depths of the System, epitomized by Norfolk Island, they may have underestimated the moral and human significance of these places in their laudable desire to avoid sensationalism. It is true that relatively few convicts were pitched into these hellholes. It is also true that only a small fraction of the total population of Russia has suffered in the Gulag, and that relatively few Cubans have undergone the atrocities visited on dissidents by Fidel Castro’s torturers on the Isle of Pines. Yet, just as it is impossible to read a book like Armando Valladares’ Against All Hope without losing one’s illusions about the true nature of Castro’s regime, so it is difficult to reflect on places like Norfolk Island and Macquarie Harbor without adjusting some of one’s views of British colonialism. They held a minority of convicts but they were absolutely integral to the System: they provided a standard of terror by which good behavior on the mainland of New South Wales (or so the authorities hoped) would be enforced.

  The missing element in most accounts of the System has been the voices of the convicts themselves. The System left a mountain of official paper behind it. We hear a great deal from the administrators, the witnesses in the select committees, the parsons, the jailers, the masters; from the convicts themselves, very little. Accordingly I have tried, as far as possible, to see the System from below, through convicts’ testimony—in letters, depositions, petitions and memoirs—about their own experiences. Much of this material is hitherto unpublished, and much more awaits study. It turns out that one common assumption is quite wrong: far from being a mute mass, the convicts did have a voice, or rather many voices. This book is largely about what they tell us of their suffering and survival, their aspiration and resistance, their fear of exile and their reconciliation to the once-unimagined land they and their children would claim as their own.

&nb
sp; Friends gave me moral support and encouragement while I was writing this much-delayed book. Among these I should like particularly to thank Joanna Collard, who helped assemble a first list of Australian sources; Brendan Gill, whose initial enthusiasm for the idea back in 1975 sustained mine; Jerry Lieber, Barbara Rose and Lucio Manisco, on whom readings were inflicted; and Robert Motherwell, whose response to the first few chapters helped keep me going through the rest.

  As anyone must who attempts to write on Australian history from primary sources, I owe my main debt to the Librarians and staff of the Mitchell and Dixson Libraries and the Archives Office of New South Wales in Sydney, the National Library of Australia in Canberra, the Allport Library and the Archives Office of Tasmania (Tasmanian State Archives) in Hobart. In particular, Catherine Santamaria (head of Australian Studies) and John Thompson (in charge of Australian Manuscripts) at the National Library, and Geoffrey Stillwell of the Allport Library steered me through the documentary labyrinth.

  I must also record my gratitude to the Librarians and staff of the Latrobe Library, Melbourne; the New York Public Library; the State Paper Office and the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the British Library, London; the London Library, without whose lending service the early research for this book could not have begun; the Public Record Office, London; the Army Museums Ogilby Trust; the Religious Society of Friends; the Bedford County Record Office; the Derby Central Library; the Estate Office at Catton Hall, Staffordshire; the Lancashire Record Office; the William Salt Library, Stafford. For field trips in Tasmania in 1981, a car was supplied by Telford Motors, Hobart; and Dick Edwards of Strahan provided the boat in which I got around Macquarie Harbor.

  The unwieldy manuscript was cuffed and licked into shape, through its various drafts, by Charles Elliott, my editor at Knopf, backed up by Christopher Maclehose and Stuart Proffitt of Collins Harvill. Gillian Gibbins at Collins and Sharon Zimmerman at Knopf helped gather material. Stephen Frankel, the copy editor, pounced on more inconsistencies than I thought possible. I offer heartfelt thanks to them all, and especially to Professor Michael Roe of the University of Tasmania, Hobart, for his generosity and care in reading the penultimate draft of the manuscript and pointing out its various sins of omission and commission. Though my interpretation of certain aspects of penal history differs from his, any surviving errors of fact are mine.