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O Q single ship and was an M.L.C.

In document Hobart town society, 1855-1895 (Page 87-111)

Their formal pressure group was the Chamber of Commerce. W.A.Guesdon, an auctioneer, and J.H.B.Walch, the bookseller and publisher, met with A.G.Webs ter, the agricultural agent; and G. Salier, the whaleboat owner and seller of oil and wool, met

39

Askin Morrison, landowner and import-export dealer. Some of them also found useful outlet in the city council and, their influences being so much more widespread, it was this same group which dominated the council over the more numerous small-business owners.

T Q

J watchom*s career and status were vividly described by

Governor Viscount Gormanston in a letter to Joseph Chamberlain 21 December 1Ö95? Letterbook of Confidential Despatches, GO 27/l. 39W.T.A. 1867, p.88.

Many of this same elite group combined again in the Marine Board, which was established in 1857 to take over the administration of the port from the Imperial authorities. The wardens of the port always included the current Mayor and the Collector of Customs. Election of the wardens was by the owners of ships registered in the port and by importers and

exporters who paid wharfage on goods valued at more than £200 in a y e a r . ^ This system operated from the eighteen eighties but, as members had been nominated previously by the

government, the Chamber of Commerce and the municipal council, the end result was little different.

Municipal politics had to take what was left after

positions in the colonial legislature had been filled and, as Governor Du Cane pointed out, it was not exactly the cream of society who rushed into Parliament House. He told the

Secretary of State that he doubted if electoral reform could achieve the effect of:

...inducing the people of this Colony to take a greater interest in its general politics or serve the return of a more efficient and independent class of legislators....The general indifference as to political questions and the positive

disinclination on the part of men of ability and intelligence to enter either House of Legislature ^

are certainly remarkable at the present time.

^ The Cyclopedia of Tasmania, Vo

1.1, p.159*

W.T.A. 1890, p .210.

^ L e t t e r Du Cane to Granville,

17

July

1870,

Letterbooks of Confidential Despatches,

GO 27/l.

There was little chance for such a small community to have a forum for intellect in its municipal council chambers, subject as it was to the emigration of many of its most able people, and having to supply both a legislature and a body of

administrators in the public service.

There was comparatively little turnover of personnel in municipal politics between

I85O

and

I89O.

Power passed

completely from the Imperial officers to the local amateurs and became fixed in the hands of a comparatively small group of city people, challenged only by the opposing clique

interests of pastoralists in the Legislature.

But, if clique control was not so startlingly unusual, there was indeed a novel element in the passing over of administration of a penal system from Convict Department to

local players.

The Legal System, Police and Gaols

By 1856 courts were well established within the northern and southern city centres of Tasmania.^’ They were efficiently organized and, with transference of power to the colonists, re-organization of the legal system was not one of the

^Towns 1ey, Struggle for Self Government.

Appendix A - The Legislative System of Tasmania.

There is a long discussion on the merits of the system by Melville, op.cit., pp.l67-l80.

essentials. From 1828 there was a Chief Justice and a Puisne 43

Judge. ' These were sufficient through all the years of busy court business, until a second puisne judge was appointed in the easier years of the eighteen eighties (50 Viet., No.36). Nor were there any significant changes in the methods of organizing the police force or the gaols over this singular

period when the penal system was at the core of the institutional change.

In i860 a Return of Criminal Statistics supplied to the Legislature noted that there were 2,500 people for every

constable in the county of Caernarvon in Wales, a fairly average figure for Britain. In Tasmania there was one constable for every 269 people and in Hobart Town there was one for every 429 people.44 The old tradition of the penal settlement was that much policing was necessary and the evils of the employment of convicts as policemen, so well described in the histories of John West and of Henry Melville, left a

45

deep impression. While in Britain police came to represent the interests of the possessing classes over the lower orders, in Tasmania they were more the arm of impersonal power, and

4^R.W.Baker, ’The Early Judges in Tasmania’, T.H.R.A.P.P., Vol.8, No.4j September i960, pp.71-84*

44H. of A.J. i860, Paper 51. 4^West, op.cit., Vol.II, p.125.

H. Melville, History of Van Diemen’s Land (London, 1835) pp.250-257.

distasteful to most citizens. Yet they were recognized as a necessary evil whilst the degree of criminality remained high.

A diminution of the rate of crime was expected constantly from i860 onward, and most of the annual Police Reports

commenced with the lamentation that the slackening from the high rates of the penal period had not yet taken place. ^ The

long expected result occurred about 1875 > when the colony had paid through its police rates for 20 years of misbehaviour by ex-convict men and women. The usual infringements of social standards by the emancipists were of petty nature. Larceny was usually their worst misdemeanour and as they grew older and partook in colonial ease, their appearances on charges of

intemperance, idleness and insolence filled the minor courts. Most of such convictions were obtained whilst the miscreants were on conditional pardon, or were free by servitude, hence

there was no Imperial subsidy to cover their cost. Britain paid for her criminals right through to the official ending of

the penal system, but there was no way of making up to the colony for the weight of convict behaviour lingering after self-government, nor, in justice, considering the material benefits from the commissariat before 1856, was recompense due.

When there was a Royal Commission into Penal Discipline in 1875^‘^there was one prisoner still on Imperial charge: the

4°For example, H. of A.J. 1856, Paper 24, and i860, Paper 51. ^'Report of the Royal Commission into Penal Discipline' ,

infamous Denis Dogherty, committed to life imprisonment in

< o

1858

for assault whilst still a convict. Mark Jeffrey^ and Denis Ah e m e , of equally evil repute, were continuing their

lives of regular imprisonment but, since they had kept clear long enough to have been granted their release from the original servitude, they were by 1875 on colonial charge.

The administration of police and gaols was, at first sight, the most difficult one of the transition from convict settlement to free society. The reason why it did not prove to be a problem was that convict administration had been so comprehensive that colonial criminality was adequately covered by a simple relaxation of the previous system. No question

arose before I

87

O when the penal institutions were still partly 49

on Imperial charge. During the eighteen seventies there were various investigations by committees and commissions and then, by the eighteen eighties, the issue had faded because the rates of criminality had fallen so far that the few criminals could be housed without crisis, even though methods and buildings were inadequate.

Police expense and unpopularity were mitigated by the Municipal Police Act 1857 (21 Viet., No.13) which instituted municipal police-forces controlled by local officials and

4®M. Jeffrey, A Burglars Life ; or the Stirring Adventures of the Great English Burglar, Mark Jeffrey, (Launces. 1893)*

49

financed from special local police-rates. There seems little doubt that there was no deeper motivation for this change

50

than the desire of the government to reduce costs. Tasmanian society was an expensive one to run - this was one of the disadvantages which were the other side of the coin of the

boon of commissariat subsidy. It was also a difficult community to tax. With a tradition of no taxation the only spot in the interchange of wealth where the exchequer could conveniently take its cut was at the customs post. The transference of financial responsibility from taxation to rating was therefore a well-considered alternative. The decentralization of police control increased the cost of municipal development; in many rural areas it raised that cost beyond what local residents were prepared to pay, and the police onus was responsible for

51

retarding local government." But this did not apply to Hobart Town, which became the headquarters of both its own Municipal Police and also of the Territorial Police.

^ T.W.N.

, 13

February

I858.

J.B.W., Diary,

3

November

1887?

Walker

A

(ii)

51

J This has been found to have been the case in Worth West Tasmania by H.J.W,Stokes who is currently conducting research into the history of those districts - personal communication.

One of the most lasting influences of the convict days was the survival of the solidly-constructed penal buildings and their occupants, into an age in which they were largely irrelevant in the lives of the community. The Cascades Factory was so large and so soundly constructed that it was used for a variety of purposes: a hoys’ training school and reformatory, a lying-in hospital for destitute unmarried mothers, an asylum for mentally defective ex-prisoners, a pauper establishment and a contagious diseases hospital.

The main gaol was the penitentiary on the corner of Murray Street and Macquarie Street, which was said to have

dominated the Down and to have caused the old Government House and St David's to look subsidiary to it. This was not well constructed and was pulled down in the mid-fifties and its place taken by handsome classically-fronted business-houses in

the warm sandstone of the city.

Administration of the common penitentiary in Campbell Street continued blindly unchanged through the gradual transference of power and the change in criminals from ex-convicts to native born. Ho fresh look was taken at the penal establishments until 20 years after the end of

transportation. Then the Male and. Female Gaols were described. in a Royal Commission’s Report:

Year by year the relative numbers of the free, to the conditionally free, and the free by servitude, who figure in our statistics of convictions before

the Supreme and other Courts, is on the increase. When this number was insignificant, the Colony was

content to avail itself of Imperial establishments where its criminals were merged with the predominant

class which they contained. Subsequently it took over these establishments and their discipline has undergone a relaxation since, but it is one

adapted rather to the decrepitude of the ’old hands’ than to achieve the purpose of prevention, correction, or reform. The period has arrived when a new order of things is required and daily becoming more urgent....

And so long as the question of a system of secondary punishment suited to the requirements of the Colony is viewed in the light of the interests, the

feelings, or the claims upon society of that class, it is not likely that public opinion will be

conciliated in favour of any change of an elaborate description and involving great cost....

And no elaborate changes did occur. In 1877 a

rationalization process brought Port Arthur survivors into the city. At the beginning of that year the Tasman Peninsula buildings had contained 119 male prisoners on imperial funds and 255 on colonial funds. 112 were pauper-invalids and were sent to the Brickfields and New Town depots, 79 were lunatic and were put in the Cascades buildings. All prisoners serving

^ ’Report of the Royal Commission into Penal Discipline’, H. of A.J, 1875? Paper 49, p.vi.

sentences were transferred, to the Campbell Street gaol which

54

then held I84 males and /\2 females."' 1

But on the topic of penal discipline, in which Tasmanians might have been considered likely to be world experts, there was little attempt at constructive thought. Governor

Lieutenant-General Sir J.H.Lefroy thought ill of the Campbell Street gaol. He reported that;

This institution is conducted on very old fashioned principles. System there is none, there is no attempt at classification, or restriction upon the intercourse of the Prisoners with one another -

’Hard Labour' has no special meaning. The Buildings are not adapted for any deterrent or reformatory Discipline....These primitive arrangements in part

result from the transfer to the Colonial Government of a large number of Convict establishments which have been put to purposes for which they were never designed; and in part from the simplicity of a young country not yet pervated by Criminality in the acute form presented at Home; but they are highly objectionable in principle, and unless gradually improved, ... cannot fail to demoralize tue Community....

This is an extremely odd assessment of the potentiality towards crime of the one-time penal colony, but indeed it was a true statement of the situation by the eighteen eighties. The switch to a quiet provincialism was rapid and almost complete.

54cso. 10/27/431.

^ L e f r o y to Secretary of State, 3 January 1881, Letterbooks of Confidential Despatches, GO 27/l, pp.233, 234»

Strangely, division by convict stigma lasted longest in the institutions for the mentally ill. Though all communities contained persons who could be classed as dangerous lunatics, as opposed to others considered non-dangerous, in very few communities could they be placed into separate castes. The colonists had all the human capacity for prejudice, and the potentiality for a caste system was present in the post-penal situation. This was mitigated by the lack of means of

identification of ex-convicts. Had they been of different colour, or carried brand marks, or some such sign, the history of the Hobart Town community would have been very different. Guilt and revulsion became general and undirected feelings, because the saving grace was that the emancipists and the always free were indistinguishable except by reputation.

But this was not so with the lunatic convicts; these poor souls were, till their deaths, branded as evil. There was always believed to be a close association between convictism and lunacy, and asylums were an integral part of the penal institutions. Convict mentally-defectives showed up as such over the years of their detention and they were abandoned by segregating them at Port Arthur, without attempt to analyze their distress or to treat it in any way.

^°'The rate of lunacy was lower up to 50 [years of age] from

50 upwards it was very much higher' -'Report on the 1881 Census’, H, of A.J, 1883, Paper 72, p.XXXV.

When Port Arthur closed 79 of the convict male lunatics were still imprisoned there, and they were sent to a wing of the damp and gloomy Cascades building. In 1883 only 61 were left. These were a sorrowful remnant of transportation; the youngest of them was 47 years of age, and several were in their sixties. They had all been admitted to asylum before 1857> and the oldest

57

had not been out for 40 years, since I842. In I89I 56 of them were still alive and still locked away.

In l88l the Cascades Asylum was described to Parliament: Many of the Inmates of this institution are still

convicts under life sentences, nearly the whole are ex-convicts, and among them are some criminals of the worst class. The place appears to me

pervaded by rather more of a penal aspect than I should wish to see but its origin as a Convict Prison and the dangerous character of some of the Inmates must be duly considered....Unhappily the severities of a byegone age of Prison discipline are chargeable with much of the insanity here „ treated....

In contrast the New Norfolk lunatic asylum attracted the comment: ...the institution, built many years ago as a

convict establishment, is old fashioned, but spacious and comfortable with all necessary accommodation - the situation is peculiarly

cheerful - the treatment of the patients appeared to be all that could be desired in humanity and kindness, and a fair proportion of recoveries R

takes place. 57

v ’Report of the Royal Commission on the State of Lunatic Asylums’, H . of A,J. 1883, Paper 42.

58

J Lefroy to Secretary of State, 3 January 1881, Letterbooks of Confidential Despatches, GO 27/I.

The free insane were looked after at Hew Norfolk. Despite its 20 miles separation from Hobart, it remained an institution of the capital city; its staff, its commissioners, its medical visitors, and its inmates were mostly from the city. The asylum had been maintained on colonial funds since transfer from imperial authorities and, to supplement this, inmates were charged what they could afford. Special cases paying high fees entered the Gentlemen’s or the Ladies' Cottages and were apart from the hoi polloi. Control of the lunatics seems to have been neither strict nor enlightened; their abnormalities were merely endured by the staff. Criticisms made to an 1883 Royal Commission by city doctors were that the inmates'

symptoms should be classified and treatment attempted. But little was done; a virtuous palliative learned from North American sources was the therapy of agricultural work and as vegetable production reduced costs this recommendation was

implemented. Complaints that the proportion of inmates returned to society was very much lower than in Britain and

JÜThe Catholic Bishop R.W.Willson had concerned himself with madhouses in other countries but he seems to have found little constructive to say about the Hobart Town situation.

T. Kelsh (ed.) Personal Recollections of Robert William Willson, (Hobart, 1882).

the mainland were met by dark allusions to the weakness of tne convict strain in the population, and discussion was srilled.

The number of inmates had increased from 200 in the late eighteen fifties to almost 300 hy 1883? in suitable proportion with the population increase. The staff employed to mind them was ten to twelve or about one member of staff to every 2^ inmates. Trained nurses and attendants were unobtainable in Australia and schemes to import some from Europe were slow to

In document Hobart town society, 1855-1895 (Page 87-111)