The Fatal Shore: A History of The Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787 to 1868 by Robert Hughes (1987)

‘Warra, warra‘
(First recorded words of the first indigenous people met by the captain of the first convict fleet to Australia in 1788. They mean: ‘Go away’)

Prime fact: The First Fleet of 11 ships transporting convicts from Britain to Australia landed at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788.

If you’re my age you might remember watching the Australian journalist and art critic Robert Hughes (1938 to 2012) presenting his ground-breaking TV series about modern art, ‘The Shock of the New’, back in 1980. He looked like a boxer and expressed feisty, sometimes controversial, opinions in a muscular, punchy prose style.

Seven years later Hughes published his epic study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, ‘The Fatal Shore’ (1987). It became an international best-seller because there were few if any histories of Australia which presented the facts of the country’s early history with such a combination of solid research and journalistic brio.

‘The Founding of Australia by Captain Arthur Phillip RN, Sydney Cove, 26 January 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937) [The British flag was not officially planted until 7 February 1788, when possession was formally proclaimed]

The text is laid out in a pleasingly clear structure, proceeding logically topic by topic and exploring each of them thoroughly and convincingly.

The narrative starts dramatically with the arrival of the first shipload of convicts at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788. What was the land like that they had arrived at? Hughes gives us several pages description of the astonishingly weird and unique fauna of Australia (pages 3 to 7) and his narrative will go on to be peppered with periodic descriptions of the arid, sunburned, eucalyptus-riddled terrain.

Indigenous Australia

What were the people like that they met? He gives us a ten-page summary of what was then known (1980) about Aboriginal or indigenous culture (pages 7 to 18).

What comes over in his description is the really primitive nature of Aboriginal culture: the Aborigines hadn’t invented the bow and arrow, they had no buildings, they hadn’t even invented the tent (unlike American Indians) because they never stayed long in one place. Some made temporary lean-tos out of bark which the settlers quickly nicknamed ‘humpies’ but their entire way of life was based on firing the bush to catch wildlife, then moving on.

It’s now thought that Australia had been inhabited for over 60,000 years when the Brits arrived. Its inhabitants had developed a patchwork of tribes and peoples and nations, each inhabiting large tracts of land (Australia is only fractionally smaller than the landmass of continental United States, 2,969,907 square miles to America’s 3,119,884 square miles). To this day scholars debate the precise number, but at least 300 languages and language families existed.

The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia

The people who inhabited the area of south-east Australia where the Brits landed were called the Iora. They had no concept of private property so the Brits couldn’t barter with them. They didn’t wash, in fact they covered their bodies with fish guts as a prophylactic against disease and so stank to high heaven. They treated their women appallingly. Unwanted children were aborted by ingesting herbal medicines or simply thumping the pregnant woman’s stomach. Deformed babies were killed at birth. There was no room for the weak in the Indigenous people’s nomadic economy.

Hughes’s description of the Aborigines sets the tone of the entire book. It is going to be deliberately anti-Romantic, debunking myths, puncturing legends, showing that the reality is always more squalid and sordid than the rose-tinted stories he and his generation were told at school or prim progressives tell each other today about the noble savage. In this story, nobody is noble.

According to the estimates available to Hughes, when the Brits arrived in 1788 there were an estimated 300,000 Indigenous Australians across a continent the size of America. No wonder it felt almost ’empty’ to the Europeans: no towns, no villages, no buildings of any kind, no agriculture, nothing that registered with them as civilisation or culture.

(I wouldn’t be surprised if someone contacts me to say this description is unduly negative. Hughes makes every effort to be fair to the Indigenous Australians, and to depict their heart-breaking plight, but he was writing nearly 40 years ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of his account is wrong and/or nowadays considered offensive. I apologise in advance if it is and am happy to be corrected.)

Georgian crime

Why was the transportation policy created by the British? Hughes gives a fascinating review of the growth of criminality in Georgian Britain (the long century from 1714 to 1830), which powerfully conveys the stink, poverty and abject misery endured by most of the population (pages 19 to 42).

The Georgians refused to set up a police service, as many nations on the continent had, because of an obstinate belief that it would infringe on the ‘liberty of the subject’ which they fetishised. (Plus the French had a form of police who had the right to enter and search private dwellings, so if the French had one, it must be bad.) But at the same time, the second half of the 18th century witnessed a population explosion which resulted in a surplus of young men who migrated from the country to the city, discovered there were no jobs for them, and so took to crime.

In the absence of a police force the Georgian authorities resorted to passing ever more draconian laws, an astonishing number of them carrying the ultimate sanction i.e. the death penalty. Eventually, there were some 200 statutes carrying the death penalty on the books and you could be hanged for burning a house or hut, a rick of corn, for poaching a rabbit, for damaging a fishpond, for cutting down an ornamental shrub of appearing on a high road with a sooty face (p.29). These were in fact provisions of a particular law, the Waltham Black Act of 1723, designed to stop agrarian unrest in Hampshire (the lawbreakers moved at night with blacked-up faces, hence the oddly specific provision). But most crime was urban and the result of poverty and starvation. As you read on you come across plenty of examples of people transported for life for stealing a loaf of bread, some butter, some bacon etc.

Middle-class people could be transported too. An architect was sentenced to death for forging a contract, commuted to transportation for 14 years (p.297). A satirical poet, Michael Massey Robinson, tried to blackmail an ironmonger by threatening to publish a scurrilous poem about him and was transported for life (p.300).

Hughes describes the rituals of hanging day and the long trek of the victims’ cart from Newgate prison to Tyburn ‘tree’, the sturdy wooden frame situated where Marble Arch is now, the route lined with cheering Londoners, the actual hangings witnessed by crowds of up to 30,000, drinking heavily, pullulating with pickpockets and whores, the whole thing, paradoxically, a festival of criminality, something which outraged moralists deplored in Boswell’s day (1760s and 70s) and Dickens was still complaining about in the 1850s (pages 31 to 36).

‘The Idle Prentice Executed at Tyburn’ by William Hogarth (1747)

In fact Hughes returns to the question of class and crime repeatedly throughout the book. I suppose it’s obvious but I hadn’t thought about the way the policy of transportation was merely one aspect of British penal policy. In other words, it was entirely dependent upon and reflected 80 years of British social and economic history. What was happening in Britain entirely dictated who was sent to Australia, and when and why and in what numbers.

In other words, the book is as much a social history of Britain during this period as it is of Australia. Thus there’s a lot more detail than you’d expect about, especially early on, about, for example, the geography, slums and criminal classes of Georgian London.

The hulks

Britain had no nationwide prison system, in fact at least half of the prisons were privately owned and run (p.37). There was no belief in rehabilitation, prisons were just regarded as dumping sites for toxic males to stew in their own juice.

By the 1770s the prisons had become so overcrowded that the authorities had the bright idea of sending the ever-increasing population of convicts to prison ships or ‘hulks’, the rotting shells of decommissioned navy ships moored in harbours like Portsmouth and Plymouth. In 1776 Parliament passed the ‘Hulks Act’ (16 Geo III, c.43) (p.41). These hulk-bound prisoners were used as labourers in the naval dockyards and, in the picture below, can be seen being taken by boat from a hulk to their work on the mainland.

Prison hulk at Deptford, London, after a painting by Samuel Prout (about 1826)

The American precedent

One of the little known facts about the period which I found fascinating is that the practice of transportation was already well established, but it was transportation to the American colonies. The Transportation Act of 1717 had begun the process of sending indentured servants to Britain’s colonies in the Americas 53 years before Australia was even discovered. Between 1717 and 1777 as many as 40,000 convicts were sent to America for seven or 14-year periods. They were sold to shipping contractors who then sold them on in America to plantation owners in the Caribbean or mainland in what Hughes describes as a ‘thinly-disguised form of slavery’ (pages 40 to 41).

But when they declared independence in 1776 the Americans refused to accept any more British criminals. Anyway, as Hughes points out, they didn’t need them. By the year of independence more African slaves were arriving in America every year (about 47,000) than white convicts had done in the previous 60 years put together (40,000) (p.41).

At first the British authorities thought the Americans would give up their fight for independence. It took until 1783 for the government to finally accept American independence and another few years for the full implications to be worked out for Britain’s overflowing prisons. By the early 1780s even the hulks were overflowing and William Pitt’s government was receiving angry demands from MPs for Plymouth and Portsmouth to do something about them. There began to be riots aboard the hulks, convicts rebelling against the disgusting conditions. In one riot aboard a prison hulk, in 1786, eight convicts were killed and 36 wounded (p.65).

It’s fascinating to read Hughes’s account of the way the mounting complaints of MPs with hulks in their constituencies became a real political problem for Pitt and drove him to appoint a commission to look into ways of disposing of the convicts which filled them – surprising that the problem of what to do with Britain’s surplus convict population became such a leading political issue. It crossed my mind it was a little like the refugee crisis of our own day: successive governments keep promising to do something decisive about it and keep dismally failing. And both involve boats and the problem of what to do with unwanted people…

The other side of the world

Fascinating to learn that, as a result, the British authorities were open to all suggestions, and that a number of entrepreneurs came up with bold and crazy schemes. One was to transport the convicts to the island of Lemane 400 miles up the River Gambia and set up an African penal colony there (p.64). Or how about a penal colony somewhere off the coast of South America?

Zeroing in on the continent which was eventually chose, Hughes gives us a potted history of European theories and encounters with the legendary southern continent before Captain Cook did his first definitive exploration of Australia’s eastern coast (pages 43 to 48). He describes the voyages of Magellan and various intrepid Dutchmen, mentions the Englishman, William Dampier, who touched on the north-west coast of Australia in 1688.

Captain Cook

Then, of course, Captain Cook. Hughes gives a typically factual, forthright and gripping account of Cook’s expeditions, devoting some space to the long-running problem for all seafarers of scurvy, and how Cook, a modern innovator in this as so many other things, lost not a single man from scurvy by the savvy use of anti-scorbutics. As Hughes puts it, with typical pith and wryness:

Malt-juice and pickled cabbage put Europeans in Australia, as microchip circuitry would put Americans on the moon. (p.49)

Hughes gives a characteristically thorough and vivid description of Cook’s voyage in the Endeavour (‘a converted Whitby trawler, small and brawny’, p.51). He devotes a fascinating few pages to the technical inventions which had just recently made such map-making voyages more precise and useful, namely John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, a device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea (pages 50 to 57).

The convict problem

Prisons overflowing with unreformable criminals? A newly discovered continent on the other side of the world? The British authorities put two and two together and realised that this was an opportunity to redirect the now-defunct American transportation policy, and on a far larger scale. Fascinating to learn that the policy was accompanied or swayed by a number of other considerations. For example, Admiralty strategists suggested that establishing a colony in Australia would aid in the ongoing conflict with France to establish naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Others pointed out the need to have a base in the Far East to compete with the well-established Dutch colonies out there.

Practically minded boosters claimed that the tall pine trees and flax plants Cook had noted on what he named Norfolk Island, 1,000 miles off the Australian coast, could quickly become a commercial business, capable of supplying Royal Navy ships with masts and sails. In the event, none of these pipe dreams were to work out. Sydney is, quite obviously, on the wrong side of the continent to be of use in patrolling the Indian Ocean and the ‘pine’ and ‘flax’ on Norfolk Island turned out to be commercially worthless.

The First Fleet

And so, after a great deal of prevaricating, and parliamentary committees, and bickering about the number of ships and who should captain them and how it should be paid for – typical British bumbling – the first convict convoy was dispatched to Australia in May 1787 and arrived in the place Cook had named Botany Bay, on the southeast coast of Australia, on 20 January 1788. It was commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip who was to become first governor of the new penal colony.

Hughes gives a characteristically thorough profile of this modest man (a ‘middle-aged nonentity’) who had had a patchy naval career and was in retirement when contacted by the Admiralty to carry out the policy which had finally been agreed by the government of William Pitt (pages 67 to 71). What comes over is Phillip’s professionalism. Hughes shows that he thought the equipping and provision for a fleet setting out to colonise an entire continent from scratch was hopelessly inadequate and bombarded ministers and Admiralty for more (p.71).

Of the 736 convicts sent at least 431 were guilty of ‘minor theft’ and Hughes gives examples of how pitifully trivial these might be (p.72). The oldest was Dorothy Handland, aged 83, a dealer in rags convicted for 7 years for perjury. The youngest was John Hudson, a chimney sweep aged 9 (p.73).

Hughes gives a characteristically thorough description of the challenges of the 8-month-long voyage (252 days) across 15,000 miles of ocean. Forty-right people died on the journey while 28 were born. All were to be confronted by the immense disappointment of Botany Bay when they finally arrived. Within days Phillips and his lieutenants had realised it was wholly impractical as a settlement, not least due to the thin sandy soil cluttered with eucalypt detritus. The bay was open and unprotected, the water was too shallow to allow the ships to anchor close to the shore, fresh water was scarce, and the soil was poor.

So they sailed up the coast to Port Jackson, the name given to the bay area where Phillip established a settlement he called Sydney, after the current Home Secretary ,Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (p.87).

The starvation years

Agricultural opportunities turned out to be very poor. Supplies were meagre and Phillip had to introduce rationing which got steadily tighter (p.96). Crops failed or wouldn’t take. The convicts became too tired and listless to work. The first couple of years were dire and some wondered if the entire colony would die of starvation, before the final arrival of the Second Fleet in June 1790.

The Second Fleet was notorious for the poor conditions aboard the vessels, and for cruelty and mistreatment of its convicts. A quarter of the 1,006 convicts transported aboard the fleet died during the voyage and around 40 per cent were dead within six months of arrival in Australia. Hughes describes in stomach-churning detail the disgusting conditions aboard the early convict ships. Not all ships in the fleets had the same standards. Those in which people suffered worse, were worse treated and with the highest death rates came to be called the ‘hell ships’.

First failed attempt to colonise Norfolk Island

Norfolk Island is about 1,000 miles east of the Australian coast. It turned out to be extremely inhospitable, the pine trees weren’t true pines, the flax couldn’t be woven, it was immensely difficult to clear the land for agriculture. A ship bringing supplies and more convicts sank, losing the supplies but adding hundreds of mouths to feed, making 959 in total. All that saved the first settlers from starvation was easy availability of tame mutton birds, Pterodroma melanopus which they slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. By 1830 the settlers had driven the mutton bird to extinction (p.100).

Van Diemen’s Land and the genocide

He devotes a section to the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land off the south coast of Australia under the command of David Collins (pages 120 to 128). The island had named in honour of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sent the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on his voyage of discovery in the 1640s. In 1642 Tasman became the first known European to land on the shores of Tasmania but the Dutch never followed through on the discovery. Now, 150 years later, the British claimed it. The capital, Hobart, was named after the Secretary of State for the Colonies who was the patron of Collins’s expedition.

The island was initially perceived to be less fertile than the land around Sydney and early attempts at farming failed, so the colonists faced starvation. What saved them was the humble kangaroo which was far more common than around Sydney. Every able-bodied man was issued a gun to hunt and kill kangaroo for himself and dependents (wife or children).

As Hughes pithily puts it this reliance on hunting triggered social results, all of them bad. It installed the gun rather than the plough as the totem of survival on the island. It incentivised settlers to ignore long-term planning required for farming and live by day-to-day hunting. And as nearby roos were wiped out and the heavily white settlers ranged further afield it brought them into conflict with the native populations who, more often than not, they shot.

It soon created a fringe class of armed, uncontrollable bushmen, most of whom regarded Aborigines as vermin. (p.126)

With their guns and hinting dogs these men became completely independent of the authorities. They were the first bushrangers. And so were laid the foundations of what would be the only real genocide of the British Empire, the deliberate extermination of the entire native population of Tasmania.

Impact on Indigenous Australians

As to the natives, the government had explicitly ordered friendly treatment, enjoining Phillip to ‘conciliate their affections…[and] live in amity and kindness to them.’ At first this held, but what nobody knew was the white ships had brought white infectious diseases, endemic in Britain and entirely unknown in Australia, flu, cholera, smallpox, typhus, which quickly spread. it was a common sight for the early settlers to come across indigenous corpses huddled in the bush where they’d crawled to die. The British incomers were, literally, a plague.

As settlement spread out from Sydney, the Aborigines took to fighting back, raiding farms, killing livestock, singling out for assassination white farmers of community leaders who’d acquired reputations for killing them. Which triggered massacres of unarmed Aborigines by vigilante gangs, for example the Myall Creek massacre when at least 28 unarmed Indigenous Australians were executed by 12 armed colonists on 10 June 1838. Which triggered further revenge raids, and so on, in a deadly spiral downwards into a sustained ‘frontier war’ (pages 272 to 281).

The System

Year by year the shipments came to be called ‘the System’, the process of sending shiploads of convicts to Australia, who had to build their own prisons and barracks for the soldiers who guarded them and pleasant houses for the civil authorities who supervised the whole thing.

Between 1787 and 1868 around 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia and Hughes goes on to give a fascinating and vivid description of every stage of the development of the System.

Hughes is at pains to dispel the stereotype of life under the convict system which he and his generation inherited, which is that it was a living hell on remote ‘secondary’ or punishment settlements on Van Diemen’s Island. On the contrary, most convicts served out their time, then were released to become citizens in the fast-growing new colony.

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 labour, never worse chains, got their tickets-of-leave and in due course were absorbed into colonial society as free citizens. (Introduction, page xiii)

He makes one simple but devastating riposte to the endless cheap jokes about Australia being a land of convicts:

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.

Hell ships

Conditions on the first ten years or so of ships was so appalling they acquired the nickname of ‘hell ships’. Conditions of unbelievable squalor which people who’d sailed on both thought were worse than slave ships. And the condition of the survivors was no better. A propos slavery, an anonymous convict ballad from 1825 runs:

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 Dieman’s Land.

Conditions were dire. In the early years the entire colony nearly starved. But as the settlement at Sydney became established so did its reputation for appalling brutality. The descriptions of lashings and floggings which litter the book are quite nauseating, with prisoners’ backs being reduced to raw meat, bystanders being flecked with lumps of raw flesh.

Hughes devoted a passage to proving that conditions for the convicts were not literally slavery, not as practiced in the Caribbean or American South; convicts had legal rights and could take the masters they were assigned to to court (pages 282 to 287), if arrested they could invoke habeas corpus (p.346), something African slaves couldn’t do. But conditions were consistently atrocious and exploitative nonetheless. It’s difficult to imagine the primitiveness of the conditions.

Governor Macquarie’s Australia was more backward than Cromwell’s England. There was as yet no steam power; draft animals were few; and there were no streams near Sydney reliable enough to turn watermills. So every hole was dug, every log sawn, every rock quarried and every ton of rubble moved by that least efficient of engines, the human body toiling in gangs. (p.298)

Futile escapes

Obviously convicts tried to escape continually. The most shocking story is of a group of convicts that escaped in Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) and ended up eating each other. There was a persistent folk belief that if you travelled north far enough you would get to China. In fact most escapees either perished in the Outback from starvation and thirst, were murdered by Aborigines, or stumbled back into government settlements more dead than alive. Hughes devotes a chapter to the more colourful escape attempts, notably that of Mary Bryant (pages 203 to 226).

New South Wales Corps

The New South Wales Corps were formed in 1789. Indisciplined and corrupt it quickly gained a reputation for lawlessness and corruption. In particular it acquired a monopoly of the importation and sale of rum to convicts and freemen alike, so much that it was nicknamed the Rum Corps. It repeatedly clashed with the civil governor, most flagrantly in the 1808 Rum Rebellion against governor Bligh who tried to assert civil power over them, see below.

Governors of New South Wales

1. Arthur Phillip 1788 to 1793

Commander of the epic First Fleet and settlement at Sydney, which he named. After guiding the colonists through the early starvation years as they struggled to establish agriculture and had to repeatedly reduce rations of the limited supplies they’d brought from Britain, Phillip was allowed to return home.

Lieutenant-Governorship of Francis Grose 1793 to 1795

For the next two years the military were in complete control of the fledgling colony under Lieutenant-General Francis Grose. The European population of New South Wales when Grose took over was 4,221, of whom 3,099 were convicts. Grose established military rule, abolished civil courts, and made generous land-grants to his officers. Grose unmercifully exploited the convicts and during his lieutenant-governorship a great traffic in alcoholic spirits (mostly rum) developed, managed and run by officers of the New South Wales Corps. This clique gained control of the courts and management of the lands, public stores, and convict labour, all led by John Macarthur, ‘British Army officer, racketeer, entrepreneur, grazier, usurper and politician’.

2. John Hunter 1795 to 1800

Hunter had been second in command on the First Fleet. He was appointed governor and tasked with combating the abuses of power built up by the New South Wales Corps, represented by their commander, John MacArthur, but was too mild and fair-minded to succeed. In fact the militarily cleverly sent letters back to the British ministers accusing Hunter of the very crime and peculation he was trying to stamp out, with the result that he was recalled in 1799 to defend himself.

3. Philip Gidley King 1800 to 1806

King helped develop livestock farming, whaling and mining, built many schools and launched the colony’s first newspaper but was forced to resign after conflicts with the military. He appointed Major Joseph Foveaux as Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island where Foveaux ruled with extreme brutality and sadism.

4. William Bligh, 1806 to 1808

Chosen as the job because a strict disciplinarian who was tasked with taking on the military and their control of the hugely profitable rum trade. However his confrontational style led to the so-called Rum Rebellion of 1808, a coup d’état in which the New South Wales Corps arrested Bligh, keeping him first in confinement in Sydney, then aboard a ship off Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, for the next two years.

Lieutenant-Governorship of Major George Johnston, 1808 to 1810

Johnston led the troops that deposed Governor William Bligh, assumed the title of lieutenant-governor, and illegally suspended the judge-advocate and other officials. The administration of justice became farcical, and there were signs of strong discontent among the settlers. He sailed back to Britain in 1809 where he was court-martialled but let off with the lenient sentence of being cashiered.

5. Lachlan Macquarie 1810 to 1821

Had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century

The Irish

Like every subject he touches, Hughes gives the background to the arrival of the first Irish convicts with brisk authority. He gives a whistlestop review of the colonisation of Ireland by England, which had started back in the twelfth century, and led to the creation of a society divided between Protestant rulers who deprived the native Catholic majority of land and rights for centuries (pages 181 to 195).

The reason this is needed is because in 1798 a great rebellion broke out in Ireland which terrified the English ruling class because a) it united both Protestant and Catholic rebels and b) the rebel leaders allied with England’s traditional enemy, France, leaguing with a French force to land in the west of Ireland and combine with them against the British occupiers. Unfortunately, the plans were discovered and most of the rebel leaders arrested before the planned rising and invasion could take place.

The 1798 Irish rebellion on the National Army website

Most of the rebel leadership was killed and estimates of the total death toll of the subsequent fighting have been put in the tens of thousands. Hundreds of the rebels were briskly tried and transported to Australia. Here they presented the authorities with a severe security problem. The English convicts, surly and disobedient and quick to escape, nonetheless were the same nationality as the authorities. The Irish, on the contrary, refused to accept the authority of any part of the System and took every opportunity to buck it. With the result that governors and leaders of the New South Wales Corps were doubly severe and brutal with them.

The Irish were ‘doubly’ convicts. At the slightest suspicion of ‘mutiny’ they were liable to severe punishment, for example when five suspected leaders were each given 500 lashes (p.187). The brutality of their treatment triggered the very mutiny the British authorities feared in the form of the Castle Hill revolt in 1804. On 4 March 1804 233 convicts, led by Philip Cunningham (a veteran of the rebellion of 1798, as well as a mutineer on the convict transport ship Anne), escaped from a prison farm intent on capturing ships to sail to Ireland. The authorities quickly declared martial law and despatched troops who surrounded the rebels on a hillock nicknamed Vinegar Hill on 5 March. While negotiating under a flag of truce Cunningham was arrested then the troops opened fire and decimated the rebels. Nine of the rebel leaders were executed and hundreds were punished with severe floggings.

This was the largest convict mutiny in Australian history but there were further small revolts and a continual atmosphere of sullen anger among the Irish and paranoia among the English. From 1815 to 1840 the Irish countryside was in a state of more or less continual civil war and, in total, some 30,000 Irish men and 9,000 Irish women were transported from Ireland to Australia. This was never forgotten in Irish communities who nursed the grievance of their persecution.

Hughes attributes a strong Irish flavour of bolshie independence to the Australian national character, especially to its working class culture. The long, bitter memories of the Irish community gave a permanent legacy of sectarianism to Australian politics.

Rebels and revolts

Transportation would deal with representatives of every British protest movement, rebellion, upheaval and agrarian revolt for the first half of the 19th century so Hughes’s account has the effect of shedding light on a whole series of political rebellions back in Britain. It’s like reading two histories side by side, that of Britain and that of Australia. British protest movements included:

the Scottish Martyrs – the first political agitators transported in the life of the System were convicted in Edinburgh in 1793 and were known as the Scottish Martyrs (pages 176 to 181)
the Irish rebellion 1798 – In 1798, an underground republican group known as the Society of United Irishmen instigated a major uprising against British rule in Ireland
English Jacobins i.e. sympathisers with the French Revolution, whose activities were increasingly persecuted after Britain and France went to war in 1793
frame-breaking Luddites 1812-13
food rioters from East Anglia 1816
members of the Pentridge Rising 1817
members of the Cato Street Conspiracy to which planned to assassinate the entire cabinet, 1820
radical weavers from Scotland, 1821
Bristol rioters 1831
Captain Swing – fictional author to whom threatening letters were attributed during the rural Swing Riots of 1830, when labourers rioted over the introduction of new threshing machines and the loss of their livelihoods (pages 198 to 200)
the Tolpuddle Martys, 1834
more than 100 Chartists, political activists associated with political campaigns surrounding the Great Charter, a set of demands to extend the franchise to the working class, which was inaugurated in 1839, then flared up periodically through to 1848
the Canadian Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 led to the execution of the ringleaders and the transportation to Australia of at least 100 convicts (p.261)

The colourful adventures of the first fleets and the starvation and the antics of the New South Wales Corps grab the reader’s attention, but the heyday of transportation was actually during the 1830s, which saw unparalleled poverty and suffering throughout rural Britain, an epidemic of disorder and crime, and so the peak numbers of transported convicts (p.197). So, throughout the book, the history of transportation is also a detailed history of English social and economic misfortunes.

Bushrangers

Though most attempts to escape were futile failures, plenty of convicts ran off into the wild and became known as ‘bolters’. As the colony expanded, agricultural land was created along with flocks of sheep so there was more for convicts living in the wild to steal. By the 1810s society was stratified enough between large landowners, often senior officials in the administration, judges and the like, and more ordinary smallholders, for convicts living in the wild to make a living stealing sheep or goods from rich landowners and secretly selling it onto the poor. These were the first whites to range through the uncultivated parts of the territory which the settlers had taken to calling ‘the Bush’ – hence ‘bushrangers’ (also known as ‘bolters’). With typically neat turn of phrase, Hughes says:

By taking to the bush, the convict left England and entered Australia. (p.243)

Hughes is as cynical and unillusioned about the bushwhackers as about everyone else in this sorry story. They gave rise to a legend which help inform Australian’s image of themselves as rebels and non-conformists and freedom fighters, who ran away rather than submit to injustice, as Robin Hoods stealing from the rich to give to the poor. The reality was, of course, both more complex and less idealised than that.

Colonial life

Population

The first formal census of New South Wales was made in 1828. It showed that for the first time the free population eclipsed the number of convicts, 20,870 free and 15,728 convicts = total of 36,598. Sydney had a population of 10,815 i.e. less than a third.

Contented convicts

In fact the peak of transportation due to English rural unrest leads to a counter-intuitive result; which is that, as Hughes showed, many of the convicts transported in the 1830s loved their new lives. He quotes many letters back to loved ones reassuring them that convict life was not at all the hell everybody believed it to be. Why? Because there was work, pay and food. These were the very basic elements of life the rural poor were rioting for during the 1830s and they were to be had in abundance in a now settled and well-organised colony.

The man assigned to a decent master in the country districts in the 1830s was, as Eyre pointed out, ‘in a better position than half the honest labourers of England’. (p.314)

And:

Convicts who found benevolent masters far preferred their assigned life to the miseries they had known in England. (p.316)

Class and snobbery

Hughes shows that, contrary to stereotypes of matey modern Australia, the early colony developed into a society obsessed with class. In particular the newly rich and free emigrants were desperate to distance themselves from ‘the stain’ of convictry. Names developed to describe the new colonial classes and the number of names for the same thing indicates the intensity with which people indicated their (or others’) origins:

Convict: British prisoner, generally sentenced to death back in Britain, who has their sentence remitted to either a 7-year or 14-year transportation
Government man: a convict
A ticket-of-leave man: a ticket of leave was a parole document issued to convicts who had shown they could be trusted with some limited freedoms
Emancipists: convicts who had completed their terms of imprisonment and were now free settlers
Exclusives: members of the sociopolitical faction of free settlers, officials, and military officers of the convict colony, who tried to copy English fashions and recreate a hierarchical class system
the Currency: ‘currency lads and lasses’ (collectively known as Currency or The Currency) were the first generations of native-born white Australians, the children of the British settlers and convicts; currency as in money, coins or notes that were ‘only good in the colony’ (p.354)
the Sterling: by contrast with the Currency, the Sterling was another name for free-born emigrants (p.355)
Merino: an early immigrant to Australia with no convict origins; a member of a leading family in Australian society; a person of fine breeding or good character
Specials: educated convicts, a relative rarity (probably fewer than a third of transported convicts could sign their own names, p.349)
Old hands: old former convicts who lived on into the era after transportation ended (p.594)

Sheep or seals

Hughes devotes a passage to describing the first sheep farms in Australia and profiling the men who imported and cross-bred the delicate merino strain with hardier breeds (pages 318 to 322, and 326 to 331). He explains how the isolation of shepherds sent off into the Outback to guard their master’s flocks, sometimes in pairs, helped develop the particularly strong Australian concept of ‘mateship’, i.e. sticking with your mate through thick and thin.

So it comes as a surprise to learn that for the first 50 years of its existence, the colony’s major trade was whale and seal catching (pages 331 to 336).

The end of transportation

Overall, the transportation System lasted from 1788 to 1868, during which period some 162,000 convicts were transported. By the 1830s Sydney was settled enough and large enough, with an increasingly free-born residents and settlers, that they lobbied the British government to end transportation. At the same time there was another force at work which is fascinating to learn about. I knew about the long-running opposition among British liberals and religious groups to slavery which became the abolitionist movement and which achieved its goal of having slavery made illegal within the British Empire in 1807. I didn’t realise the same group of people opposed transportation just as vehemently, and gained growing support in the 1800s as reports percolated back to Britain of the atrocities carried out against convicts in hellholes like Norfolk Island. Just as there was a movement to abolish slavery, so there was a movement to abolish transportation.

Thus with pressure from liberal Establishment figures in Britain combined with lobbying from the increasingly free and genteel population of New South Wales and led the government to cease transportation to New South Wales in 1840 (p.484). Transportation to Van Diemen’s land ceased in 1853 (p.402) 50 years to the day after the first settlement was founded at Risdon Cove (p.572).

Was the System a success or failure?

Over the life of the system the British government used about five reasons to justify the policy:

Strategic To protect against French influence in the Indian Ocean and Far East. In the event the French never tried to claim any part of Australia, the Dutch Empire was engaged by other means. No port in early Australia became an important naval station.

Regarding specifically crime, the System aimed to do four things: separate, deter, reform and colonise.

1. Separate

Separate the criminal classes from the general population on the analogy of amputating a diseased limb. This failed because it was based on the false premise that criminality is an inherited genetic attribute whereas, in almost all cases, it is the result of bad education, poor upbringing, childhood abuse and, in the great majority of transported convicts, the result of lack of work, lack of opportunity, poverty and starving.

2. Deterrence

This is always difficult to assess because it’s impossible to measure the number of crimes which weren’t committed. But the arguments against are a) contrary to the claims of its proponents, the crime rate in England did not drop after the policy of transportation was introduced (because its roots lay in gross inequality, crushing poverty and lack of opportunity) and b) for a lot of the English working classes, especially from the hunger years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Australia sounded like a land of opportunity. Hence the instructions given to governors like Brisbane, Darling and Arthur to apply relentless suffering to the convicts; hence the appalling brutality of the chain gangs and the barbaric cruelty of Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay. But it didn’t work. Increasing number of emigrants left for Australia of their own free will. The gold rush of 1851 crystallised the image of Australia as a place the poor and downtrodden of Britain could go to to make a fortune.

3. Reform

Hughes thinks chances are the system did actually ‘reform’ a lot of convicts, in the sense that they came out the other end as law-abiding citizens and, if so, this was down to the assignment system. Many masters were poor, brutal, some were sadistic; but the system did assign men to meaningful labour, which gave them some sort of self respect. It had many flaws but assignment did get many men back into society as self-sustaining workers.

4. Colonisation

Here the system was an undoubted success. Australia would never have been colonised without the forced labour of over 100,000 transported convicts. No sane free man would have emigrated there in 1788 or 1808. Although most of the first buildings they erected have been demolished and built over, convict labour created from nothing the settlements which now have populations of millions.

Hughes’ style

When he wants to be, Hughes can be a formidably vivid writer:

The sight of the hulks at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich was deservedly famous. They lay anchored in files on the grey, heaving water, bow to stern, a rookery of sea-isolated crime. As the longboat bearing its prisoners drew near, the bulbous oak walls of these pensioned-off warships rose sheer out of the sea, patched and queered with excrescences, deckhouses, platforms, lean-tos sticking at all angles from the original hull. They had the look of slum tenements, with lines of bedding strung out to air between the stumps of the masts, and the gunports barred with iron lattices. They wallowed to the slap of the waves, and dark fleeces of weed streamed in the current from the rotting waterlines. (p.138)

The kind of purple descriptions a scholar, a professional historian, would never attempt. But his narrative is continually punctuated with dazzling displays of prose virtuosity.

Some convicts who tried to cross [the Blue Hills], thinking China lay beyond, died of hunger in their immense labyrinth of sandstone, where bellbirds chimed and long filaments of water fell, wreathing, from distant cliffs. (p.299)

And pages 373 (Macquarie Harbour), 399 (Port Arthur).

Slang and jargon

basil – an iron fetter worn on one leg only
a canary – 100 lashes (p.345)
buttock-and-twang – sex as practiced by prostitutes (p.255)
cramping box – punishment cell or room or box too small to sit or lie in (p.155)
a sandstone – weakling who crumbled under flogging (p.345)
stringy-back – wizened, poor farmer (p.256)
triced – secured by a rope or chain (p.155)

Placenames

Australia – since australis is Latin for ‘south’ terra australis was the name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.

Botany Bay – named by Captain Cook as testament to the number of specimens collected by expedition scientist, Joseph Banks.

Brisbane – named after Major General Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, 1st Baronet, British Army officer, administrator, and astronomer, and sixth governor of New South Wales, from 1821 to 1825.

Hobart – named after Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire aka Lord Hobart, secretary of state for the colonies who commissioned Captain David Collins’ expedition to settle Van Diemen’s Land.

Melbourne – founded in 1835 with the arrival of free settlers from Van Diemen’s Land and named after the then British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.

Sydney – named after Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney by Captain Arthur Phillip, leader of the first transport of convicts to Botany Bay, who moved location to the cove north of it, called Port Jackson by Cook, but renamed after Sydney.

Van Diemen’s Land – named in honour of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sent the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on his voyage of discovery in the 1640s.

Old joke

Australia was always destined for greatness because her population was chosen by the finest judges in England! (p.354)

Credit

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes was published by William Collins in 1986. References are to the 1987 Guild Publishing hardback edition.