Warwick Hirst - Great Convict Escapes in Colonial Australia

WARWICK HIRST

GREAT ESCAPES
BY CONVICTS
IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA

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For Anne, Robert and Catherine

Contents

Introduction

Roosting on the highest shelf in my study is a rather scruffy collection of World War Two books which I acquired during the early 1960s from the second-hand bookshops which then proliferated in Sydney between Circular Quay and Haymarket. My initial and lasting preference was for personal narratives of captivity and escape. In quick succession I consumed titles such as The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams, Boldness BeMyFriend by Richard Pape and The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill. With fascination I read of the ingenuity of prisoners of war in making use of the most unlikely material to fashion false identity cards, civilian clothes, compasses, maps and all the other paraphernalia needed to evade their captors; and then how they made their way through occupied territory, often with the assistance of local resistance groups, to eventual safety or in many cases recapture.

In later years my interest in stories of escape was rekindled when, in the course of my work as an archivist, I came across a number of memoirs written by convicts who had made daring escapes from colonial Australia. These, to my mind, were equally as exciting as those from the Second World War. While lacking the legitimacy of escapes by prisoners of war (whose duty it was to escape), they are still remarkable examples of human endeavour and resourcefulness.

Unlike the prisoners of war who were confined by barbed wire, it was remoteness and isolation that challenged the convicts. Admiral Sir George Young, who proposed a plan to the British Government in 1785 for settling convicts at Botany Bay, was of the opinion that the remoteness of its situation promised a place from whence it is hardly possible for persons to return without permission. From the admirals point of view, escape was inconceivable.

And so, in the main, it proved. Despite the absence of stone walls and iron bars, to escape from the colony and get clear away to a safe haven was a difficult proposition. The formidable barriers of distance, trackless bush inhabited by hostile Aboriginals, and the vast Pacific Ocean formed an effective natural prison whose perils relatively few convicts managed to overcome, although many made the attempt.

Nevertheless the desire to escape was strong and even before the First Fleet had arrived in Botany Bay the first attempt had been made. While the ships were moored at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, a convict named John Power lowered himself over the bow of the Alexander and swam to the jolly-boat lying astern. He climbed in, cut her adrift and floated across the harbour on the current. He attempted to board a Dutch East Indiaman but was rejected by the crew and next morning was discovered by a search party as he was preparing to row to the Grand Canary, fifty kilometres away.

The establishment of the first settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788 provided increased opportunities for escape by land and sea. Within a matter of days a group of convicts had evaded their marine guards and cut across country to Botany Bay where the ships of the French navigator, La Prouse, lay at anchor. He refused to take them on board and they had little choice but to straggle back to Sydney Cove. Over the next few years convicts occasionally took to the bush one or two people at a time but this changed with the arrival of a boatload of Irish convicts in 1791. They went off in numerous bodies, few of whom ever returned, reported David Collins then the colonys first Judge-Advocate. However, as the colonys records reveal, his optimism was unfounded.

Ignorance of their whereabouts in the world led one party of twenty-one Irish convicts to conceive the notion that China was situated only 240 kilometres to the north on the other side of a fordable river. In November 1791 they set out on their journey with provisions for a week, but as Surgeon Peter Cunningham wryly commented:

through want of sign-posts, or some other essentials, on the way, they became bewildered in the woods, and returned to the settlement so squalid and lean that the very crows would have declined the proffer of their carcases.

This evident failure did not deter further attempts by other Chinese travellers, nor did the gruesome discovery of fifty convict skeletons in the bush. In the convict imagination, China was a land of mystery and fabulous wealth, of almond-eyed girls and quaint palaces, above all it was a land that offered respite from oppression and the lash.

In 1798, ten years after settlement, the convict William Noah noted with some incredulity that this geographical ignorance was still common. The Situation and Extent of this Country is layd Down by several geographers, he wrote,

where they make it certain of being an Island of the length of 4000 Miles but it is not the Opinion of the Common people & so Obstinate they are of its Joining India that several have been lost in Indeavo-ring to find it out.

Even as late as 1803 four convicts left Castle Hill for China. Only one survived. He was found by a kangaroo hunter twenty-one days later exhausted and starving on the banks of the Hawksebury River.

Another misguided belief which drew escaping convicts (colloquially called bolters or runaways) inland was disparagingly reported by Governor John Hunter:

In addition to their natural vicious propensities, they have conceived an opinion that there is a colony of white people in some part of this country, in which they will receive all the comforts of life without the necessity of labour.

In 1798 some sixty men set out for this fabled paradise, supposedly 500 to 600 hundred kilometres south-west of Sydney, supplied with the figure of a compass drawn on a scrap of paper to guide them through the bush. Perhaps even more bizarre was the belief held by some convicts that if they travelled south they would reach Ireland, knowing that as Ireland is a colder country than New South Wales, and that the cold winds blow from the south, therefore Ireland must lie in that direction!.

More realistic in his objectives was an enterprising character from the Second Fleet named John Crow who was on a fourteen-year sentence for burglary. After breaking out of the lock-up at Parramatta he made his way to Sydney where he swam out to an American vessel anchored in the harbour. He was detected climbing on board and as punishment was thrown in the black hole at the guard house at Sydney. A night or two later he escaped by untiling part of the roof. He was apprehended back at Parramatta and for this and other offences was sentenced to death. A few hours before his execution he tried to effect another escape by jumping down the privy. Later it was discovered that he had removed some bricks from the wall of his cell, and it was David Collinss opinion that had he gained the respite of another day, he would easily have escaped.