Eventually, from his estate, Revesby Abbey, Sir Joseph Banks wrote to Anne Flinders that he had ‘infinite satisfaction in informing you that Captain Flinders has at last obtained his release and is expected in England in a few weeks, and that on his arrival he will be immediately made a Post-Captain’.
At their reunion, Anne was appalled to see her 36-year-old husband grey-headed from his ordeal. But perhaps Flinders’s character as a man was seen in his willingness to visit French prisoners-of-war, whose families he had known on Mauritius, and distribute letters and money to them from their relatives. It was the kindness of various French families in Mauritius which had sustained him during his capture and compelled him to this generosity.
At his lodgings in London he suffered from what he called ‘either a stone or gravel in the bladder’. He had suffered forms of this complaint almost throughout his entire detention. His diary mentions passing gravel or ‘gravelly sand’. Sick as he was, and fevered, with a wife desperately worried for his health, he was delighted to hear that his journals were progressing at the publishers, as was his ‘general chart of Terra Australis, or Australia’. He told a friend that he now looked fully seventy years of age. He died the day after his work was published, aged forty.
THE TATTOO AND THE LASH
A considerable number of the convicts transported to Australia carried tattoos on their bodies, and the authorities recorded them as an aid to identification. These marks were acquired not without pain. The tattoos of the day, once cut in the flesh, were made permanent and lifelong by the rubbing in of soot or of black sediment from lamps. Some tattoos recorded the names or initials of the beloved, as with a convict transported in 1828, Laban Stone, a married man with a wife, Sarah, and a son, John, left behind in England. The markings on his arm as recorded in his ship’s muster are: ‘LS, SS, sun, JS, three, 1831 [probably the year his sentence would end], heart’. Laban Stone thus told the story of his passions and intentions on the length of a limb. A convict Eleanor Swift carried on her arm a tattooed declaration, ‘Patrick Flinn I love to the heart’. Sometimes women carried tattoos in less obvious places. Elizabeth Stephens’s tattoo, dedicated to ‘F. Spooner’, could be seen only when she undressed for the surgeon. Simon Gilbert, a groom found guilty of stealing a bridle, and sent to the hulks to await transportation, had ‘Man in irons’ tattooed on one arm and an anchor and SG on the other. William Rouse, transported for poaching, recorded his and his wife’s birthdays on his arms: ‘Wife, R. Rouse, born April 1 1812, of W. Rouse born April 24 1810’. A butcher from Cork, Denis Barrett, carried a Masonic emblem, a harp and the war cry ‘Erin Go Bragh!’.
Symbols of enduring affection—sun, oak, anchor or heart—were often set beside a particular set of initials. Other marks included caged birds, a woman resting her hand on a tomb in mourning, boxing matches, cockfights, a man sitting on a cask of rum, Highland warriors, cutters, brigs, schooners and barques. The cross or texts of scriptures often competed for space on the convict’s skin with slogans of defiance and phallic jokes or naked women—‘obscene marks’, as the authorities said. The cross of the crucifixion was most commonly found on Irish convicts.
Some tattoos were acquired in the public houses of working-class London, some from the county jails or Newgate, in which there was ample leisure for self-decoration, and others from the hulks. Some were even acquired on board ship.
The tattoo, wrote one historian, was like a bodily aperture for the imagination—through it the convict could escape exile and loss and return to his pre-transportation days. One convict, Thomas Cavender, would take to his Australian grave the following tattoo on his arm:
May the rose of England never blow,
May the Scotch thistle never grow,
May the harp of Ireland never play,
Till I poor convict greets my liberty. T.C.A. 20 18 30.
The other tattoos, the tattoos imposed by the state, were involuntary. They were scars from the lash, and they marked the bodies of early Australians as distinctly as the exuberantly inked flesh decorations, but these caused lovers to wince, and the bearers to curse and tell dark stories.
There was as well as the lash for women, the practice of humiliating them by shaving their heads—an instinctive way of mocking or denying their sexuality. Though a temporary punishment, it could be enacted painfully and with public derision. Threats to shave female heads en masse, and the exemplary shavings undertaken in the Female Factories, a cross between a female shelter, workshop and prison, caused riots amongst the women, as in Parramatta in 1827, 1831 and 1833, in Hobart in 1827 and 1842, at Moreton Bay in 1836 and Launceston in 1841. Foster Fyans, the Moreton Bay commandant between 1835 and 1837, wrote: ‘the loss of hair . . . was held in the greatest dread and abhorrence, often causing disorder and riot, cursing, tumbling and flinging before the constabulary could carry out the sentence, when any other punishment could be carried out without a murmur’.
A convict, O’Connor, mentions a Sunday parade organised by Captain Logan in 1829 at the Moreton Bay settlement (later Brisbane). The female convicts were marched into church that morning in a manner that betrayed Logan’s assumption that the church was simply another arena for the control and undermining of the human soul. The women’s heads were all shaven, and there were iron collars on their necks with iron chains connecting each woman to the next. Male-size irons were on their legs. The caps they normally wore to church were forbidden to allow troops and convicts to hoot and cat-call at their baldness. Here or there, a lover must have kept his silence or been egged into betraying guffaws.
Physically, it was better than flogging. It is the lash and its scars which both excite and embarrass Australian remembrance. Yet flogging was normal Georgian practice, and not just in penal colonies. It was regularly used in both the British army and navy. Where then to place Joseph Holt’s horrifying description of the flogging of Paddy Galvin at Parramatta in 1800, the reduction of the young man’s back, buttocks, thighs and calves to jelly? Holt did not think this a normal or justifiable punishment. But then he was in passionate sympathy with the young Irish patriot.
If repeated sentences of flogging were normal, why did the magistrate, the Reverend Marsden, gain repute amongst his contemporaries as a flogging parson? John Skottowe Parker, a liberal-minded superintendent of agriculture at three convict depots during the 1820s—Port Macquarie, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay—thought the lash a regrettable necessity in environments where officials’ lives were threatened by the convicts amongst whom they worked. Parker later wrote, ‘I have been an isolated member cut off from society, surrounded by the very worst of my species, compelled to freeze in my breast all those finer feelings of humanity.’
Another notorious flogger, Captain Patrick Logan was a Scottish officer who succeeded to the command of Moreton Bay under a mandate from Commissioner Bigge and Governor Brisbane to be less lenient on convicts. According to the Sydney Monitor in August 1830, there were, under Logan, ‘punishment field-days’, on which the convict complement was drawn up and ‘skulkers’ and recalcitrants were selected by the commandant and his overseers from field gangs for ritual punishment—‘fifty or a hundred lashes apiece’— in front of their fellow prisoners under the guard of soldiers and constables. The overseers were themselves convicts, yet for the sake of punishment their intentions and selection of victims were considered appropriate by Logan, as if they would not be motivated by spite or bullying, or if they were, that was thought an acceptable part of the system. This scene on the humid banks of the Brisbane River provides par excellence a tableau of the petty authoritarianism which would live on in Australian public affairs beyond convict times.
It is sometimes remarkable how calm the voice of the flogged survivor is. Thomas Brookes, a convict at Port Jackson, Newcastle and Moreton Bay, calculated receiving eight separate whippings, totalling 1025 strokes, upon his body. ‘They were not comfortable to take,’ he commented. ‘My back had been cut and chopped, until it was scarcely ever well.
’ The intense pain of a scourging produced ‘a boiling sensation’, according to Brookes, ‘as if being scorched with a red hot iron . . . we felt we were slaves’. Brookes believed the lash turned men into demons who took their dark rage out on other prisoners.
A convict named Davies at Sarah Island off the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land reported, ‘The cats and the way they were made and used were the most dreadful things that can be thought of. They had nine tails or rather thongs, each four feet long . . . and each tail had on it seven overhand knots . . . some with wire ends, some with waxed ends . . . [the victim] was immediately sent to work, his back like bullock’s liver and most likely his shoes full of blood . . .’
A much-flogged, apparently eccentric convict, Frank MacNamara, known as Frank the Poet, was flogged fourteen times to receive a total of 650 lashes, served three and a half years in iron gangs doing hard labour on roads, docks and in quarries, served thirteen days of solitary confinement and three months on the treadmill near Sydney’s Brickfield Hill.
He then spent two years on the hulk Phoenix in Sydney Harbour, from which he tried to escape five times, and addressed the superintendent about potential time in solitary:
Captain Murray, if you please
Make it hours and not days.
You know it becomes an Irishman
To drown the shamrock when he can.
[Drowning the shamrock is to drink, probably to excess.]
Frank’s final punishment was seven years at Port Arthur. There he made a number of attempts at absconding and imagined himself a potential bushranger, bushranging being an assertion of liberty to his mind:
Then hurl me to crime and brand me with shame
But think not to baulk me my spirit to tame,
For I’ll fight to the last in old Ireland’s name,
Though I be a bushranger,
You still are the stranger and I’m Donahue
[Donahue was a mythic Irish bushranger.]
Despite his numerous punishments, Frank would be permitted to perform for his fellow convicts in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land during the 1830s and 1840s. On Christmas Day 1842 at the prison settlement at Port Arthur he entertained his fellow prisoners, including the Irish bushranger Martin Cash, with his recitations, announcing himself as he always did at his performances:
My name is Frank MacNamara,
A native of Cashel, County Tipperary,
Sworn to be a tyrant’s foe,
And while I live, I’ll crow.
Were the more than six hundred lashes given to Frank the Poet of therapeutic value for him or the body of society? They certainly warned other felons not to be too flamboyant. Crowing itself was the triumph for Frank. He never became a bushranger, but he understood the meaning of that gesture of renouncing the settled regions and the orderly progress of a sentence to conclusion.
Moreton Bay remained a harsh place for flogging. In 1836 Captain Foster Fyans was questioned by two Quaker visitors, George Washington Walker and James Backhouse, about flogging, and suggested that the best way to explain it was to have a man flogged so that they could observe the effect, which he himself described to them as follows: ‘The first lash, Friend, the skin rises not unlike a white frost . . . the second slash . . . often reminds me of a snowstorm . . . the third slash, Friend, the back lacerated dreadfully . . . the painful feelings then subside . . . for the blood comes freely.’
The Quaker visitors tried out the treadmill too, and found after ten minutes they were exhausted, whereas prisoners would be kept turning the thing for up to fourteen hours at a time.
Although floggings were not officially to be administered publicly after 1820, they were carried out before captive convict audiences—road and chain gangs, groups of assigned servants, and the populations of secondary punishment centres—throughout the 1830s and beyond. There is no doubt that many commandants—for example, James Morisset at Newcastle and later on Norfolk Island—felt their authority enlarged by each stroke of the lash.
Occasionally, convict solidarity surfaced in the face of the lash, and a convict scourger would refuse to do his work, but the system had attended to this possibility by its appointment of overseers and constables, the equivalent of Kapos in German concentration camps. These men were often segregated for their own safety from the convict ranks, but if the convict struck out from his humble station amidst the gang, it was often the overseer or constable he targeted, not the officers above. At Moreton Bay, Chief Constable James McIntosh, who was cherished by his commandant for arresting forty runaways, was described by the commandant’s convict clerk, William Ross, as one of the most tyrannical men in New South Wales, who seemed ‘to delight in human blood’. While at Moreton Bay, three attempts were made on his life—once by a prisoner and twice by Aborigines. The British Parliamentary Select Committee on Transportation in 1838 heard that the most common form of reactive violence in New South Wales was ‘the beating of overseers’; that is, of the men responsible for selecting the victims of floggings.
There were many who thought a better way could be found. The liberal governor Richard Bourke expressed fear in an 1832 letter to Morisset, harsh commandant of Norfolk Island, that treatment at the penal stations was ‘tending more to harden the heart of the criminal and render him reckless of life’ than to produce his reform. ‘Something it is said must be wrong in a system which apparently produces greater crime than that which it was framed to punish,’ he argued. But when it came to balancing the normal punishment of the lash against ration deprivation, he admitted that flogging was ‘the means under providence most likely to effect the reformation of the criminal’.
A colonist, JC Byrne, who travelled from Sydney to Brisbane in the mid 1840s, believed he could unmistakably tell a flogged convict by his face. ‘A peculiarity of visage, different from all other men, is recognizable; whilst their countenances are of a dark brown hue, parched and dried up, muscles and all, as if they had been baked in one mass.’ What Byrne found most disconcerting was the flogged convicts’ hostility to their former masters, and their willingness to sing low ballads full of abuse and the dream of revenge. With the wave of progressive thought that achieved the final abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833, there was a reaction against the universal belief in the lash as essential punishment. The Molesworth committee of enquiry into the New South Wales system appointed a Scots penal visionary named MacConochie to administer Norfolk Island on a merit points system for four years. The experiment rehabilitated many prisoners but any of its failings to modify the behaviour of all convicts were taken as proof this system did not work. But MacConochie’s replacement, John Giles Price, reintroduced the lash as part of the standard repertory of control, along with the treadmill and suspension by one hand.
But a new penology was emerging in Britain, the so-called ‘silent system’, which would replace the physical torment of the lash with the mental torment of isolation, involving hours of solitary oakum-picking, and even the removal of strident sounds, such as metal bells, as too stimulating to the criminal senses.
By 1843, the Quaker James Backhouse, visiting Macquarie Harbour convict station on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land, claimed that corporal punishment was not as common as solitary confinement—‘with evident advantage’. Later, when he witnessed two floggings in Launceston, he wrote ‘this punishment tended to confirm me in its inefficiency compared with solitary confinement’. In his dark and lonely hole, the convict might become, so it was hoped, something like a medieval monk in the stone cells of the Hebrides, or be refined into one of the desert fathers of early Christianity.
GANGS
Lieutenant Jonathon Warner was typical of the young military surveyors posted along the length of the North Road being built from 1826 onwards to connect Sydney to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. Newly appointed, he found himself stationed at Lower Portland Head on the Hawkesbury River, surrounded by rich floodplains, awesome escarpments, and close to the property of the ex-convict Co
ckney settler, Solomon Wiseman, who was making a fortune from the road and the ferry he managed. Lieutenant Warner’s challenges included not only the doubly convicted men of the work-gang but also the proudly illiterate Solomon himself, who sold produce to feed the gangs. Wiseman was a Thames lighterman who had stolen a consignment of Brazilian wood, but although transported had been able to bring his wife and children aboard his convict ship, and after serving his time had run hotels and a shipping business before founding his own lordly estate on the Hawkesbury. At Lower Portland Head (now known as Wisemans Ferry), he built a large villa, two-storeyed, with wings and extensive outhouses. He called it Cobham Hall after the magnificent place in Kent he must once have seen.
When the travelling judge Roger Therry visited the enterprising Wiseman in 1830, he was half-amused at Wiseman’s pride in his lack of education and manners, and his determination that his sons not be subjected to any spoiling from education, and yet, said Therry, Wiseman was earning £3000 to £4000 per year like a genuine aristocrat, just from government rationing contracts. For after the Great North Road had been marked out through his property, Wiseman had applied for a hotel licence, a ferry licence and for supply contracts. The government granted him everything he asked for, since he was so well placed to help. He was difficult to deal with and frequently dishonest, palming off inferior meat and supplies on the gangs.