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| ISBN-13: | 9781741768671 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Australia's Birthstain
The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era
By Babette Smith
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2008 Babette SmithAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-867-1
CHAPTER 1
something to hide
Shame about the convict origins of the Australian colonies and shame about convict ancestry increasingly coalesced during the nineteenth century to a point where convict topics were avoided in public discourse as well as private conversation. This reaction was well established by the 1870s when novelist Anthony Trollope, who visited all the colonies, noticed the colonists' sensitivity about the subject, their reluctance to discuss it and, in New South Wales and Tasmania, a tendency to downplay the convicts' crimes. Western Australians by comparison were convinced that their convicts were the worst kind of criminals. However, avoiding the subject was not always possible. For instance, both the Centenary of settlement in 1888 and Federation in 1901 required some public acknowledgement of history. The fact that the colonies were established by transportation was undeniable. So the colonists were forced to develop an explanation to dilute the stain that they felt it cast on their society. At the time of the Centenary, they defended themselves by emphasising the brutality of the penal system operated by Britain, the tyranny of its officials and the oppression of the suffering convict by flogging, starvation and slave labour in chains. However, as Federation included a commitment from the fledgling dominion to Britain and the British Empire, the focus had to shift from the shameful system to the individuals who had been transported. It was in this context that the nature of the convict crimes became a matter of debate.
While transportation operated, the type of crimes that the convicts committed was rarely discussed. The length of their sentences was of far greater significance to the officials and settlers in the colony, where only the crimes that were publicised by the British press assumed any prominence. Colonial crimes were a matter of frequent discussion both publicly and privately, but in most cases and to the chagrin of penal reformers in Britain, what the prisoners had done to warrant a sentence of transportation was not a matter of interest and had little or no impact on how they were treated during their sentence. In fact, before 1820 convicts were usually shipped out with their sentence carefully recorded for the benefit of the local officials but with no record at all of their crime.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the crimes committed by the convicts assumed significance locally in the context of a campaign to end transportation. Writing in The History of Tasmania, which was published in 1852, the Reverend John West justified the opposition to transportation on the grounds that 'more serious offenders' were now being transported compared with the convicts who had arrived earlier. This point was reiterated more specifically at the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Transportation in 1861, at which time the only penal colony still in existence was Western Australia. Giving evidence to the Committee, Mr James Youl, who was also an anti-transportationist from Van Diemen's Land, claimed that because of changes in British law the prisoners sent to Western Australia had all committed 'some very grave offence' whereas previous convicts had been transported 'for political offences, for poaching, machine breaking, and so on'. Youl's rationale for opposing transportation had obvious appeal to those who were trying to ameliorate the effects of their colonies being founded by criminals. To the extent the topic was discussed at all during the nineteenth century, this became the acceptable line.
From the early twentieth century, with transportation safely in the past, professional historians began to express opinions on the criminality of the convicts sent to Australia. Essentially, their debate, which will be canvassed in more detail later, can be summarised as a swing of the pendulum from convict as innocent victim to convict as professional criminal. There have been subsequent gyrations around notions of convicts as skilled workers forced into crime and some lateral diversions into special categories, of which social and political protesters were the most deeply explored by the early 1980s.
The first salvo by an academic historian was launched in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society by Professor George Arnold Wood, an Englishman who had arrived in New South Wales in 1891, three years after the Centenary. Wood noticed Australians' anxiety about the convict past and began to consider this professionally. In 1921, he delivered a paper to the Royal Australian Historical Society in Sydney. In his opening words, he confronted the colonists with the very issue they sought to avoid when he declared: 'The most important founders of New South Wales were the convicts.'
Wood's opinions had obviously been developed by his advisory role during the preparation of the Historical Records of Australia, the first volume of which was published in 1913. The project involved examining the despatches transmitted between the early governors of New South Wales and ministers in England, and Wood quoted liberally from governors Macquarie and Brisbane to demonstrate his conclusion that 'the early governors, who ruled over both emancipists and free settlers, and knew both classes well, did not think the emancipists were worse citizens than were the free settlers. They thought, in fact, that of the two classes the emancipists were the better.' Realising that misgivings about the character of the convicts were deeply entrenched in the minds of Australians, Wood enlarged his point about their worth by turning his attention to the people who ordered their transportation. 'The guilt of the condemned will be better understood if we have some knowledge of the virtue of the condemners and the reasons of the condemnation.' Among other sources, Wood cited the extensive research by sociologists J.L. and B. Hammond, which was published in 1913. To support his argument that the convicts were mainly poachers or protesters driven to commit their crimes by poverty and victimisation by a wicked British aristocracy, he quoted the Hammonds' description of conditions in England: 'Men and women were living on roots and sorrel; in the summer of the year 1830 four harvest labourers were found under a hedge dead of starvation and Lord Winchelsea, who mentioned the fact in the House of Lords, said that this was not an exceptional case.' Wood reinforced his point about the moral character of the convicts by telling his audience that 'men with starving wife and children at home, broke stones on the edge of immense parks in which "game" was preserved for the pleasure-shooting of the rich! Every brave fellow became a "poacher" ... the poacher convicts were the best villagers in England.'
Overriding the anxieties of the colonists, Wood had brought the subject into the light of discussion. But he faced a new impediment. The Royal Australian Historical Society was reluctant to publish his paper without change. Its members were not just doubtful about acknowledging the convicts as 'founders'; they were equally if not more dismayed by Wood's criticism of Britain. 'So no good people remained in England after the convicts left!' one of them cracked to the honorary secretary, who promptly invited Wood 'to revise his lecture to make clear that this is not what [he] meant to say'. Wood refused to compromise, insisting that his speech be published without change and adding a postscript to the published version which made it plain that he stood by it.
As if to illustrate Wood's argument, the sample of convicts that underpins this book contained a group of poachers who, in 1816, became embroiled in a struggle with a member of the aristocracy in the Vale of Berkeley in Gloucestershire. Newspaper reports of the events that took place there were copious and the evidence at the poachers' trials was published in such detail that it is possible to reconstruct much of what happened, including what was said.
Gloucester Journal, 22 January 1816: '"Most atrocious Murder" —On Saturday last, an inquest was held, before William Joyner Esq. Coroner, at New Park Farm, Berkeley, on the body of William Ingram, who was killed by some poachers in a wood belonging to Colonel Berkeley ... At a late hour last night we understood that there were three persons in custody on suspicion of being concerned ... and from the indefatigable exertions of Col. Berkeley and his friends, we confidently hope that the whole of the murderers will meet with that punishment which they have so daringly and atrociously braved. Vickery, from Bow-street, arrived at Berkeley Castle last night to assist in discovering the villains and bringing them to justice.'
John Penny, one of the escaped poachers, was desperately afraid and running for his life. The others had been seized. He was now the main prey. Colonel Berkeley and that Bow Street cove would not rest till they had him.
Leaving behind the banks of the Severn and the parish of Thornbury, he veered across country, rushing towards Bristol and the safety of an alibi from his wife.
He found her in the kitchen, her master and mistress gone out, the baby for whom she was wet nurse asleep. They were still arguing nearly an hour later when the sound from upstairs of men arriving and talking to her master, who had since returned home, silenced their dispute. Penny heard his name and knew he was trapped.
Back to the kitchen fire, he challenged the stranger from Bow Street to take him, swore and challenged him to shoot when the man produced a pistol, struggled and swore when the constables overwhelmed him. As they forced his hands behind his back, trussing him like an animal for the kill, he yelled down at his wife, who was clinging to him, pleading that he go quietly. 'Ye betrayed me.' When she shook her head, weeping, and the Bow Street Runner denied she had helped him, he swung on her master, 'Then it was ye who did it.' Their denials fell on deaf ears.
Salopian Journal, 7 February 1816: 'John Penny, a man of most desperate character, was taken in Bristol ... he made a desperate resistance and it required the united efforts of six men before he could be effectually secured.'
It took Colonel Berkeley a week to round up the poaching gang he suspected of committing the crime. John Penny was almost the last to be caught. In the parish of Thornbury, in a village called Moreton, another man was desperately afraid when he heard they had Penny. William Adams Brodribb, attorney at law, gentleman, was 27. He had been admitted to King's Bench and the High Court of Chancery in 1811 but before that, at the age of nineteen, he married Prudence Keen, whose family like his own were members of the Somerset gentry. They had settled in the Gloucestershire vill age in 1813, around the time their third child was born. Now, Brodribb waited with trepidation. During the past week, his apprehension had turned to dread certainty. His friend, John Allen, had been taken last Sunday by Colonel Berkeley and his party of twenty men. Tales about the confrontation had spread swiftly round the district and every version had reached Brodribb's ears. According to most, Allen locked him self in, at which the Colonel pulled out a gun. Yelling, 'I'll have you, dead or alive', he threatened to break the door down unless the farmer surrendered. From an upstairs window, Allen called down, 'What do you want me for?' 'Murder,' was the reply. One bystander claimed the Colonel's men knocked the door down. Another, that Allen opened it. Giving evidence some months later, Thomas Clarke, one of the Colonel's pack, said Allen was standing at the head of the stairs with his hands in his pockets when they forced the door open. He agreed to come down quietly if they did not lay hands on him. All the observers agreed that this request was not honoured, some claiming that the Colonel grabbed Allen by the collar when he stepped outside before handing him over to his men. Others insisted that Allen was struck twice by the Colonel with a heavy cudgel.
Flying to his master's defence came William Greenaway. Known to everyone as Shooney, he had worked for the Allen family for seven years. 'They shall not take him,' he yelled, flinging himself forward. The Colonel's fist laid him flat on the ground. 'Bring him along,' was the order. 'He may have information.' In the days that followed, Allen was imprisoned, while the Colonel, his staff and the Bow Street Runner (a member of the only police or detective force then in existence) scoured the countryside for the poaching gang. Greenaway remained at Berkeley Castle. As he put it under cross-examination, 'Sometimes I was in the servants' hall, sometimes abed, sometimes in the cook's kitchen, sometimes in the breakfast-parlour among the gentlemen.' He had been marked as a person who might confess the whole and the pressure on him was unrelenting.
Later on the day that Allen was caught, a week before John Penny's capture, William Brodribb received an invitation from Colonel Berkeley to attend the castle. His name had been mentioned, wrote the Colonel, in connection with the poaching affray.
Presenting himself at the castle as requested, Brodribb described to the magistrates what he saw on the night in question. Administering an unlawful oath was an offence established under a statute to prevent people from 'engaging in any mutinous or seditious purpose or to disturb the public peace, or to be of any association, society, or confederacy formed for any such purpose'. Brodribb later claimed that the chief magistrate, the Reverend Mr Cheston, who was taking his statement, intimated they were not inclined to prosecute him, something vigorously denied by the reverend gentleman. Nevertheless, Brodribb was franker with the inquisitors than he might have been if he had thought they were likely to charge him. Perhaps assuming that the gentlemen present, who did not include Colonel Berkeley, would accept the precautions he, a fellow gentleman, had taken against infringing the legislation, he described his careful choice of a book on which the men could swear. 'It was not the Bible. And I deliberately refrained from adding "So help you God" to the oath.' Then, Brodribb was emboldened to comment, 'Lord Ducie [another landowner] and the Colonel brought it all upon themselves by setting traps,' adding that he did not believe any of the men would ever have thought of firing upon the keepers if one of their own had not first been killed. By 'their own' he referred to the notorious death eight weeks earlier of labourer Tom Till, also from Thornbury, who was killed while poaching on Lord Ducie's preserves. Till had been killed by one of the newly invented spring guns, which could be concealed in the grass and swivelled as they spat out multiple shot. Tom Till had been found bleeding on the ground from five holes torn in his side by the leaden charge, and the villages of the Vale of Berkeley were alive with anger and resentment as much about the use of the trap as the fact of Till's death.
To Mr Cheston, Brodribb's sympathy for the poachers amounted to class disloyalty which he was not prepared to let pass. 'Such observations imply you know more about the murder than you chose to disclose,' he responded. Realising his error, Brodribb attempted to recover his ground by making what was later described as 'a sort of apology'. When pressed by Mr Cheston whether he thought Till's death justified the poachers' actions, he hastened to reply, 'No. I do not think them justified.' But the damage was done. At that rash disclosure of his true feelings, the world of privilege and power to which William Brodribb had access turned against him. A week later he heard the knock he had been expecting on his door.
The Times, London, Friday 9 February 1816: 'On the 28th.ult. Wm. Adams Brodribb, late of Moreton, in the parish of Thornbury, gent, was committed to Gloucester Gaol, by J.B. Cheston, clerk.'
In the Vale of Berkeley, Miss Flora Langley of Hill Court, Lord Ducie of Tortworth Court and Colonel William Berkeley of Berkeley Castle were the chief landowners, but it was the Colonel who drove the pursuit of the poachers. It is true that he was within his legal rights. The Game Laws granted landholders such as Berkeley exclusive rights and privileges to shoot game on their preserves. First instituted under Charles II in the seventeenth century, the restrictions had increased in severity throughout the eighteenth, step by step retreating from the Charter of the Forests introduced two years after Magna Carta, which generously promised that 'none shall lose life or limb' for pursuing the King's game. The rapid enclosure of public land abolished the common man's opportunity to shoot a pheasant, whatever ground he stood on to do it. But it did not 'abolish' the tradition of making a living by shooting game, or the taste for eating it, let alone the idea of feeding a family by such means when no funds were available to buy food. After estates and commons were removed from public access by enclosure, the idea of 'fair game' collided with the newly instituted Game Laws. Poaching became a manifestation of the class war — a civil war in fact, which was never declared.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Australia's Birthstain by Babette Smith. Copyright © 2008 Babette Smith. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of maps,Introduction,
Chapter 1 Something to Hide,
Chapter 2 Amnesia,
Chapter 3 An Amazing Cast of Characters,
Chapter 4 A Convict Community,
Chapter 5 Outward Bound,
Chapter 6 The Bathurst Road,
Chapter 7 An Unclean Thing,
Chapter 8 A Pervading Stain,
Chapter 9 Best Forgotten,
Chapter 10 Distinctions of Moral Breed,
Chapter 11 The Lost World,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,