Australian Crime And History

Early colonial Australia was rife with ambiguities – a small and tarnished population, adrift in the south Pacific where, so far from home and the administration of the Empire, petty grievances and jealousies regularly created situations of personal danger and injustice. Brutality mixed with human folly and evil make a melting pot. On Thursday 7 April 2016, Meg Keneally, co-author with Tom Keneally of The Soldier’s Curse: Book One, The Monsarrat Series, joined Tom Keneally – internationally acclaimed Australian writer of historical fiction – to discuss their new work and the role of crime in the Australian identity.

AUSTRALIAN CRIME AND HISTORY

MEG KENEALLY

We’ve been asked to discuss Australian history and crime, and we wanted to look at it through the lens of a question which lies at the root of Australian identity – have we really escaped the convict yard.

It is an article of faith that Australians are antiauthoritarian due to our convict heritage. I wonder, though, whether it’s authority that we object to, or inconsistency. Particularly in recent years, we’ve shown a willingness to embrace strong, stern, command and control leaders. But when those leaders have acted in a way we didn’t expect, gone back on promises or backed down from previously strongly held beliefs, we’ve been swift and merciless in our judgement.

So can you draw a line between the convict yard and the judgement of opinion polls against Kevin Rudd after he backed away from the greatest moral challenge of our generation, or between the stench of the barracks and the odour which started rising from Tony Abbott’s budget?

Perhaps. Certainly, inconsistency was a hallmark of the treatment of convicts and the punishment of crime throughout the colonial period. And this is most apparent in places of secondary punishment, such as Port Macquarie where The Soldier’s Curse is set. These were the super-maxes of the Australian gulag, remote fiefdoms where the only person who could contradict the commandant was days or weeks away by boat. We’ll get to more of that shortly, but first it’s worth looking at the root of inconsistent treatment and punishment of crime – inconsistent attitudes.

Broadly – and as with anything, there are exceptions – those who were responsible for keeping the convicts in a productive enough state to build the colony fell into two camps.

There were those who believed convicts carried a criminal gene, a felonious potential they were doomed to fulfil. There were even those who thought phrenology, the pseudo science of determining a person’s character through the shape of their skull, could identify a predisposition to crime. No redemption, no rehabilitation was possible. Convicts were not only rotten, but had been rotting since birth, and needed excision from the civic body.

There were also, though, some who were more enlightened. They certainly didn’t reject irons, flogging and the other ornaments of our early approach to criminal justice. But they were far less willing to deploy them without what they saw as good reason. We sought to embody this dichotomy in two characters in The Soldier’s Curse.

The progressive Major Shelborne owed his character to two actual Port Macquarie commandants, Francis Allman and Archibald Clunes Innes. He is concerned with ensuring the convicts under his watch have enough food and water, and can get the medical treatment they need to keep them working. He’ll flog someone if he has to, but only as a last resort. Unfortunately for our fictional convicts the major is away for much of the book, and his brutal, authoritarian second in command Captain Diamond has his own ideas about crime and punishment.

Each man, had they existed, might have found common ground with two brother officers on the First Fleet. In Lieutenants Watkin Tench and Ralph Clark, opposing attitudes to crime and punishment were transported along with the convicts.

Clark writes at simpering length of the virtues of his wife Betsey Alicia, before going quiet on the subject when he eventually takes a convict lover. He seems to have viewed the convicts as a single, seething organism, and was both fascinated and repelled by the women in particular. He writes: “I never could have thought that there were so many abandoned wretches in England, they are ten thousand times worse than the men.”

When seamen on Clark’s ship, the Friendship, were found with some convict women, the men were flogged and the women put in irons, but Clark later wrote, “I should have flogged the whores, too.”

Tench is a different proposition altogether. He drank to the success of the French Revolution when word of it reached Sydney Cove nearly a year after the fact. And he had no trouble viewing the convicts as fellow beings, and sympathising with them.

Their behaviour while waiting for the first fleet to sail was, he said: “. . . in general humble, submissive, and regular: indeed I should feel myself wanting in justice to those unfortunate men, were I not to bear this public testimony of the sobriety and decency of their conduct.”

On his way back to Britain in 1792, Tench found himself on the same boat as escaped convict Mary Bryant and the surviving members of her party, who had been recaptured and were being sent home for trial. Instead of the condemnation you might expect, he wrote: “I confess that I never looked at these people without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in an heroic struggle for liberty.”

This tension continues to be evident throughout the terms of successive governors, with the hardliners who decried the laxity of Macquarie and Brisbane finding some relief in the authoritarianism of Ralph Darling.

One of these was James Mudie, a pastoralist and magistrate who was outraged by the fact that convicts seemed to be able, after their sentence expired, to build better lives than they ever could have expected at home. Like a talkback caller who claims single mothers simply get pregnant for the Centrelink benefits, Mudie believed many in the mother country were committing crimes for the sole purpose of getting themselves transported.

Mudie was so angry he wrote a book, and we owe him for the word “felonry”, the first use of which was in the title of his work. In his 1837 book The Felonry of NSW, Mudie thunders (and really there’s no other word for it):

A very large proportion of the population, indeed, consists of branches lopped for their rottenness from the tree of British freedom, venerable for its grandeur and its antiquity, whom the outraged soil of England, shuddering at their crimes, has expelled, and whom she has with just abhorrence cast forth from her shores.

The governors who shared the land mass with Mudie could do little about him, but they were able to impose regulations for the consistent punishment of convicts on their subordinates – at least in theory.

Lachlan Macquarie gave the same instructions to the Commandants of each of the penal settlements for secondary offenders founded during his tenure. In 1821, he gave the following directive to Francis Allman, the first Commandant of Port Macquarie: “Corporal punishment should be resorted to as seldom as possible, and in no case must more than 50 lashes be inflicted on any man, whatever his crime may be”.

Allman seems to have followed Macquarie’s stipulations. But successive governors believed Macquarie was a little too lenient. If you had to choose a penal station to be sent to, Port Macquarie would be the one. Places like Norfolk Island were a very different matter.

Governor Ralph Darling viewed Norfolk as “a place of the extremest punishment short of death”, and for some of its inmates, death was preferable. Following a convict mutiny, the clergyman who had the task of telling the prisoners whether or not they would be hanged found those to be spared wept, while those destined for the noose were, if not overjoyed, accepting of their fate.

The settlements for secondary offenders did share one characteristic – they were remote from the seat of power. So if a commandant decided to disobey regulations and institute a more severe system of discipline, there was no emailing the Colonial Secretary to ask for a replacement. But those convicts in establishments closer to Sydney were equally powerless. And if there was one group more powerless than convicts, it was female convicts.

The next book in the Monsarrat series, which we’ve just delivered to the publishers, is set in the Parramatta Female Factory. By the way if you’ve read The Soldier’s Curse and are wondering about Hannah Mulrooney’s background, you’ll get it in spades in book two, which is far more focussed on the experiences of female convicts.

The Parramatta Female Factory, which by the way was opened the same year Port Macquarie was founded, was a marriage bureau where female convicts accepted unknown husbands just to get away, an employment office where people went for assigned convict servants, and at least in theory a place of industry which was supposed to add to the colony’s coffers through the manufacture of sailcloth and other goods. There is some evidence, though, that as far as a few of the superintendents were concerned, its primary function was as a personal moneymaking enterprise.

And here, there’s more than simply a tension between different styles, different mindsets, different forms of punishment.There is a tension between the interests of the rulers and the ruled.

Rations for the women of the Female Factory were short, and in practice probably even shorter than the official records show. It’s probable that on occasion portions of the women’s rations went missing. These were possibly sold on the black market.

Wherever they went, though, it wasn’t into the mouth of the women and, as a result, some went to desperate lengths to assuage their hunger.

In 1826 one convict, Mary Ann Hamilton, was found mashing and eating the bones in her ration, as well as eating weeds. For this offence, she was put in solitary confinement, secured to the ground with ropes and spikes. When she became wild, she was confined in a straitjacket. Mary Ann ultimately died, and the subsequent inquest returned a verdict of death by hunger and hard treatment.

The administrative response was to increase the rations – not the rations of the women, though. Instead, the rations of superintendent and other management staff at the female factory were increased to remove the incentive for them to steal the women’s food.

Of course, I don’t and can’t know whether our much vaunted anti-authoritarianism is in fact a reaction against, not just strong authority, but also the inconsistent application of it. If Donald Trump adorned the Australian political landscape, for example, it is hard to see him doing so as anything other than a fringe dweller. It does seem to me that we as a people are very good at winkling out inconsistencies, and very intolerant of them when we’re able to. And while not all legacies of our patchwork past are worth celebrating, this one certainly is.