John Hirst - Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony

BEING

Convict society and its enemies: a historyof early New South Wales (1983)

The strange birth of colonial democracy: New South Wales 18481884 (1988)

Freedom on the Fatal Shore reprints my two books on the early history of New South Wales, Convict society and its enemies and The strange birth ofcolonial democracy. Taken together they cover the first hundred years of the colonys history.

The phrase the fatal shore, originally in a convict ballad, has been made famous as the title of Robert Hughes magnificent book on the convict system. The advance publicity for The Fatal Shore had no need to tell lies about it, but it made the claim that this was the first book seriously to examine the convict experience in Australia. I was ropeable. Why was my book Convict society and its enemies, then four years old, being overlooked? When this claim was repeated in a quality newspaper, I determined to write a letter-to-the-editor to correct this error and push my own claims. My wife told me that I should not think of doing such a thing until I had seen the Hughes book. I am very pleased to have followed her advice. In his Introduction Hughes wrote:

Colonial Australia was a more normal place than one might imagine from the folkloric picture of society governed by the lash and the triangle, composed of groaning white slaves tyrannized by ruthless masters. The book that best conveys this and has rightly become a landmark in recent studies of the System is J. B. Hirsts Convict society and its enemies.

The Fatal Shore, sometimes drawing on my work, acknowledges that convicts were not slaves owned by their masters, that they could be punished only by order of the court, that they possessed and claimed various rights which they were very ready to defend, that they were better fed than working people in Britain, that they were not usually called convicts and, finally, that assignment to private masters, which was the centrepiece of the convict system, was by far the most successful form of penal rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, American or European history. But these acknowledgements come as summary statements; we dont see close up and in memorable detail governors and masters being forced to negotiate with convicts, or convicts working in their own time and making good money, or ticket-of-leave men running their own cattle with their masters. Hughes devotes the greater part of his book to the penal VIII settlements where convicts who committed further crimes were sent: Norfolk Island, Macquarie Harbour, Moreton Bay and Port Arthur. These were horrible places and Hughes words have the power to convey the horrors, fresh and raw. There are pages and pages on the oppressions and floggings; this is what he wants to drill into our memories.

Hughes acknowledges that I discuss the lower depths of the System but suggests that I may have underestimated the moral and human significance of these places. Certainly, he concedes, only a minority of the convicts was sent there but they provided a standard of terror which was designed to enforce good behaviour in all the rest. As in Russia under the communists, only a small fraction of the population had to be sent to the Gulag to keep the rest in line. This slips into equating convict New South Wales with the arbitrariness of totalitarian rule and so denies an important part of its normality. You could be sent to Norfolk Island only by a trial in open court where the standard of proof was beyond reasonable doubt. If everyone lived in the shadow of terror, a convict could not write home, all a man has got to mind is to keep a still tongue in his head and do his masters duty and he is looked upon as if he were at home (which I cite) or I hav got a very good place all the Bondeg I am under is to answer My name Every Sunday before I goes to church so you Mit not think that I am made a Slave of, for I am not, it is quite the reverse of it (which Hughes cites). These convicts no more lived in terror of Norfolk Island than I do of a maximum-security prison. Of course, given who the convicts were, there were plenty who did not want to work or would not accept any authority or could not stop thieving. They could well end up on Norfolk Island or perhaps be kept in some sort of order by fear of it.

None of Hughes acknowledgement of normality disturbs the controlling image of the book: that one society determined on a sort of final solution for crime by shipping its scum to the other side of the world. Scum is his term, which he uses regularly to show how convicts were thought of. But scum is at odds with much of what Hughes reports as the book proceeds like convicts having legal rights and not being called convicts and sometimes a single passage breaks down in contradiction. Consider his treatment of the Second Fleet. Since the convicts are thieves and scum, the government is happy to allow private contractors to ship them to New South Wales and make money out of it. The contractors for the Second Fleet treat the convicts appallingly, and as the dead and dying are carried off the boats in Sydney Cove the contractors open a store selling the food and clothing that should have been supplied to the convicts on the voyage. But when news of this terrible voyage reaches London, there is public outrage and an enquiry, though no one is prosecuted. Soon, however, improvements are made: contractors get paid according IX to how many convicts they land alive in Sydney; doctors are sent with them and finally doctors are given authority over even the ships master to ensure that convict health and well-being are protected. After these changes, it was safer to sail as a convict to Australia than as a free migrant to America. The story, even in Hughes hands, is of humanitarian concern extending to convicts, growing acceptance of responsibility by governments and innovative methods to extend their control. This is the world in which New South Wales took shape; its ruling spirits were not, as Hughes claimed on the first page of his book, Hobbes and Sade.