Leviathan (9 page)

 

The treasure stolen from the Aborigines – their ‘proprietorship of the soil' – was rich enough to lift another benighted people, the convicts and the poor of England, from wretchedness and want. Convict transportation – established to terrorise a whole class into submission, or simply to amputate from the social body those who refused to be cowed – perversely came to represent the best hope for some of the lowest, most debauched lumpenproles in Britain. The British government hoped the system would largely pay for itself. By exploiting the wealth of an ‘empty' continent and working its soil with slave labour, the Empire turned a neat trick of exchanging its unwanted criminal garbage for gold, wheat, wool and a thousand lesser riches.

The workers who ripped this bounty from the soil were the same men and women who had grubbed for their livelihood, such as it was, in the towns and countryside of Britain. From stealing food and clothes, picking pockets and gathering dog turds for a living, they went to a place where their labour was very much in demand. The carrot held out was freedom – a ticket of leave – and the chance to work for themselves, to shave off a thin leaf of fortune denied them at home. Each day spent toiling for the State, or advancing its interests in servitude to private landowners and colonial businesses, moved the convicts closer to that freedom.

After finishing their sentence, most could not afford the return passage, but most would probably not have cared. Years of hard work, fuelled by a healthier diet, had generally left them stronger and more capable of fending honestly for themselves. Chronic labour shortages ensured that their trades, either brought with them or learned in the colony, commanded good wages. The majority of the convicts were male and aged between seventeen and thirty; and as Manning Clark wrote, they were right for the task at hand – in the prime of their life and physical strength and not too old to adjust to strange surroundings, climate and a new social setting. For the thieves and other criminals

The colony which grew out from Sydney simply could not afford the luxury of being sniffy about its members' past. Everyone who stepped off the transports was a resource, a pair of arms and legs to clear forests, till soil, tend beasts or keep office. The police force was staffed by former criminals. Many of the public buildings which so impressed Jacques Arago were designed not by the finest French draughstmen but by an exiled English forger. In
Letters to the Right Hon Robert Peel MP
, Edward Eagar, a disgraced attorney, testified that ‘a reward for merit very rightly exists, in that convicts who have served their time can prosper'. Far from heaping poisonous middle class obloquy upon the fallen professional, as would have been required in England, Governor Macquarie wrote that Eagar was a man ‘of strong, sound good sense and superior understanding … extremely well informed as to the resources of this colony and to the general disposition of its inhabitants, their views and interests'.

As long as an individual, however recalcitrant, had something to offer and was willing to fit into the machine, he had a future. Frederick Thomas, a teenage swindler, fought the system for years and paid. Fifty lashes in 1836 for absconding. The next year spent in irons. Seventy-five lashes in 1839, another twelve months in irons for larceny after that. Caught stealing in 1842, he had another fifteen years dropped onto his sentence, to be served in an even harsher penal settlement, Tasmania. Then, at last, he got a break. After he saved the life of an officer's child, the system cut him some slack and by 1849 he had his ticket of leave, a wife and a job as a draughtsman in the Department of Public Works in Hobart, where he was eventually promoted to Clerk of Public Works. He arrived back in Sydney in 1870, a successful architect with six children.

These sort of stories did not sit well in the United Kingdom. Resentment and envy gathered around the tales of criminals made good. In 1855 Geoffrey Mundy neatly summed up for the prosecution in
Our Antipodes
.

The discovery of gold encouraged witnesses appearing before British parliamentary committees on crime and punishment in the 1850s to predict that some would be tempted into law-breaking by the prospect of a free trip to El Dorado. The Molesworth Inquiry – another investigation of the convict system, this one in the 1830s – denounced the freed convicts, called emancipists, some of whom ‘are very wealthy, and have accumulated immense fortunes'. In most cases they made their wealth, according to Molesworth, by selling sly grog and lending money to obtain land and large herds of stolen cattle. The former governor, Sir Richard Bourke, rejected the slander. The estimates of their wealth he dismissed as being ‘much beyond the truth' and Molesworth's statement about how they obtained it ‘mere gossip upon which no reliance can be placed'. While admitting some may have profited by dishonest means, Bourke defended the efforts of the rest.

The chance to carve a new life out of virgin territory was not restricted to the convicts. Their children were even more likely to thrive in the strange new environment. Mundy, who bemoaned the relative deprivations of honest workers in the old country, wrote of a twelve-year-old waiting on tables in a hotel, a four-year-old carpenter's apprentice, and Joshua Holt making £60 a year as an overseer of a gang of twenty convicts. He was just thirteen years old. As soon as a boy could swing an axe, carry water or lead a horse, the colony would call on him for work which most modern men would consider beyond their own powers. Charles Macallister, a boy of ten, regularly drove a bullock team into the dangerous wastelands between Sydney and Goulburn, hundreds of kilometres away. Young women worked just as hard in domestic service. For them, marriage was virtually a contract to provide free labour and sex.

The responsibilities laid upon the city's youth quickly pressed their childhood out of them. The government recognised this in its own census records, generally treating anybody over twelve as an adult until 1841, when the cut-off point was raised to a wizened old fourteen. Many observers were shocked not just by the independence and maturity of the first native-born white Australians but by their strength of character as well. That ‘stern and uncompromising moralist' Reverend John Dunmore Lang was ‘happy, indeed, to be able to state' after ten years in the colony, that the young were nothing like the revolting, licentious drunks who had raised them. Far from being a nation of pirates as Malaspina had predicted, the convicts' children were, if anything, a sober, law abiding and reasonably censorious group. Upwards of ninety percent of them were born to criminal parentage, so the note of surprise in Commissioner Bigge's character sketch, included in his
Report on Agriculture and Trade
of 1823, is understandable.

Molesworth had painted the colony as a sinkhole of depravity and vice. Like Malaspina he feared the creation of a rapacious, bandit nation. The truth could not have been more removed from their lurid fantasies. In 1840 Sir William Westbrook Burton, a Supreme Court judge of the colony, penned an article to refute the slurs of Molesworth's report. Presenting three years' statistics from Sydney Gaol, he showed that the vast majority of offenders were convicts or former convicts. Those native-born white Australians who did appear before him generally faced trifling charges. He never passed the death sentence on any of them, or even heard of any crime being committed which justified it.

A rider to all of this cheeriness was that the colony's women did not share nearly as freely in its plunder. Sydney the penal colony was a place created in the male image, a military world of violence and control where everyone bent to the demands of the system. A system run by men for men, with women included as a sexual afterthought. Georgian and Victorian society had a horror of homosexuality, made all the more compelling by its ubiquitousness. The women of the First Fleet, and those who followed them, were sent out not simply because they had sinned but because they could do so again, this time in the service of the Empire. It was a bit rich for Ralph Clark and John White to come over all chaste and sanctimonious when writing about the convict women; particularly as Clark took a concubine from amongst them. The women's role was explicit. Their presence was required to stymie any outbreak of ‘perversion' amongst the salty, long deprived men of the fleet. This conception of female immigration as a sort of sexual safety valve still held fast decades later when officers and enlisted men were allowed to take female ‘servants', a quaint euphemism exposed by TW Plummer who wrote to Governor Macquarie in 1811 that officers, noncommissioned officers, privates and settlers were all taking female convicts ‘not only as servants but as avowed objects of intercourse, which is without even the plea of the slightest previous attachment as an excuse, rendering the whole colony little less than an extensive Brothel'.

In 1831 the Colonial Office settled on a plan for financing free emigration to Australia, paid for by the sale of land in the colony. From 1832 to 1836 much of the money raised by this scheme funded the shipment of thousands of single women to correct the gender imbalance caused by many years of predominantly male convict transportation. It was not the first time authorities had formed a nexus between land and marriage. A few years earlier Governor Ralph Darling had encouraged a plan to give the marriageable young ladies of Sydney and beyond a dowry in the form of a generous land grant. Darling hoped to provide for several very large families made up mostly of daughters who, though respectable, possessed no property and thus no prospects. But, wrote Darling,

Nearly 30 000 acres were allotted under the scheme, mostly to the daughters of the administrative and military classes. It ceased in 1831, having become a source of deep resentment amongst the less well connected who were kept from the trough.

The migration scheme funded out of land sales was not well thought out. Hoping to siphon off huge numbers of their ‘redundant' poor, Britain shipped south thousands of unemployed labourers and women. An economic boom in Australia during the 1830s hid some of the problems. With the colony's insatiable appetite for immigrant labour and single women, many of the migrants were quickly absorbed. But when, in the latter part of the decade, a land bubble burst, combined with a credit squeeze in London and a drought in the colony, the economy imploded. So severe was the damage that rice, maize and wheat had to be imported again. Because of problems with the migration scheme, poor planning by colonial authorities and the time lag imposed by the brute fact of distance, Sydney began to fill up with sick, starving English migrants.

The trouble with the scheme of the 1830s was that the migrants were not necessarily chosen for their suitability. Many were pushed onto the boats by parish authorities seeking to ease the drain on their poor funds. Like the convicts arriving from the hulks before them, they were often in no state to travel and the death rate, especially amongst the children, was appalling. From 1838 to 1839 one child died out of every eleven making the voyage.

As ignorant and hypocritical as ever, Sydney's God-botherers and moralists worked themselves into a lather over the poor character of the women, whilst commercial interests complained that the men were unsuitable for hard frontier work. In 1835 Governor Bourke suggested the bounty system, where colonists would be paid by the government to bring out the type and number of immigrants they needed. It seemed rational, shifting control of the system to the point of delivery. However, England was still too far away for the colonists to exercise any real command over the initial selection and they came to rely on immigration and shipping agents. The bounty permits were progressively transferred from Sydney back to London, into the hands of the shipowners. When the bounty payments were increased, moving immigrants became a very profitable business and the system fell into open abuse. Shippers received £38 for a man and wife under forty years old, £19 each for a single man or woman, and £10 for children. Inferior boats were packed tight with as many migrants as possible. The system began to groan under the pressure, increased mortality en route just one sign of the coming disaster.