CHAPTER THREE
WITHOUT NATURAL PROTECTORS
It was late winter when the Constance neared her destination. Tasmanians became aware that she was somewhere on the high seas on 7 August 1858 when the Victoria
arrived with the English news which was speedily cannibalised by the local press. Although almost entirely filled with details of Palmerston's controversial India Bill, the
Mercury found space to announce the imminent arrival in the colony of two trophy cannons captured from the Russians in the Crimea and a shipload of female emigrants:
The last emigration transaction of the Family Colonisation Society was completed on May 7, by the departure from Gravesend of the Constance, having on board 129single females and six families selected by the Society. The ship was bound for Hobart Town; and judging from the appearance and
demeanor of the young women, we cannot but think they will prove a valuable acquisition to the Tasmanians. 1
The piece was quoted verbatim from the Times; the colonists waited expectantly. Less than a week after this announcement, the Constance herself was sighted off the coast of Tasmania, but the news was drowned out by the almost biblical tempest that prevailed for three days and three nights in the colony. On the evening of 12th August when the Constance was seen, the rain that had begun thirty-six hours before had worked itself into a frenzy over the colony. That night was reported as one of 'Egyptian darkness' by Zephaniah Williams Davis who was travelling down from the Midlands as an outside passenger on the mail coach. The southerly gale was 'blowing a hurricane', and the rain was coming down so hard it felt like hail on his cheeks. Reaching the northern suburbs of Hobart at daybreak the deluge continued; water reached the windowsills of the small houses either side of what had been the road and residents had to open their front and back doors to allow the water through. The road itself had become a 'cataract'; logs, fences and fragments of furniture were carried out of sight 'by
1
Mercury, 7 August 1858, taken from the Times. The India bill preceded legislation that would transfer the administration from the East India Company to the British Crown. The Indian Empire was proclaimed on 1 November 1858. Mounted at Woolwich, the cannons were being
the angry temper of the waters'. In Hobart orchards of trees had been wrenched out, pub cellars filled, boundary walls crumbled, bridges collapsed. A postmaster upriver, carrying his daughter over a makeshift bridge to a neighbour's house, lost his footing and both fell into the torrent. He was saved by a tree but the child was taken by the flood. 2
The storm was so severe that the Constance was thwarted from coming into port. Ninety-two days she had been at sea. The euphoria of her passengers at being so close to land may well have been drowned out by sea-sickness and fear as sky and ocean merged (as Keturah Davies, a female bounty migrant on a similar voyage wrote), with waves crashing against the timber sides, the ship rolling and jerking and threatening to split in two. 3 The Constance passengers were on a coastline already littered with the wrecks of ships that had foundered just short of their destination. Nothing to do but pray and wait it out, sticking to the berths so as not to get sodden from the water pouring through to between-decks in spite of the closed hatches. When at last the weather calmed the preparations began: pots and pans scrubbed, nails pulled out; floors, berths, walls scoured by the women with chloride of lime which, Keturah Davies said burned their eyes and clung to clothes already caked with salt.4 Surplus food – oatmeal, flour, rice, pickles, preserved cabbage, potatoes, mustard, pepper, treacle, suet, Valencia raisins and butter – was measured and weighed, ready for auctioning when the ship berthed.5 Trunks and boxes were brought up from the hold and
belongings packed. Amidst all this busyness, though, the most urgent desire must have been to glimpse their destination, to take in with their own eyes a place that had, until now, only existed in their imaginations.
2 Constance sighting: Mercury, 19 August 1858. The rain began at dawn on Tuesday, 10 August,
and continued without cessation until Friday. Within seventy-two hours eight and a half inches had fallen. HTC, 13, 14, 20 August, 1858.
3 Keturah Davies, 28 October 1860: 'The rain descended as if the ocean had exchanged places
with the sky … Awoken in the night with 'the rocking of the ship and the tin plates and pans falling off the shelves'.
4
Keturah Davies, 20 November 1860. At one point between decks on the Constance had become so disgusting 'the dirt, the filth, and stench were abominable; the accumulation of dirt, rags, old boots and shoes, &c., was very great'. A day was spent cleaning. From the journal of Dr Bone, quoted in Tasmania, Legislative Council, 1858, Addenda to the Immigration Agent's Report for Half-Year ending 30 June 1858, THAJ, no. 11, p. 8.
5
Most prominent was the mountain, blanketed with the snow from the blizzards of the last week. 'Wellington', someone might have said. That the war hero was not yet dead, indicated the newness of the British settlement here. Mount Wellington warned any errant French ships that any renewed ideas of Napoleonic expansionism would be rebuffed with British might. Mount Wellington, more than any Union Jack, pronounced this island an English possession. The township the Constance women saw in the distance, with its square buildings and church steeples, was as familiar as any English town.
From this distance the only suggestion that the port the Constance was about to enter might not be a part of the British Isles was the bluish tinge of the eucalypti -afforested landscape. Coming closer, the Englishness of the townscape concealed from the new arrivals the recent displacement of an indigenous population. Although without property themselves, by the mid-nineteenth century the idea of property – its associations with power and subjection, – would have permeated every aspect of the waking lives of the Constance women: the idea that land was parcelled and owned, that proprietorship signified status, that crimes against property drew heavy punishment, that women were the property of men, that servants were the property of their masters. For some who had come from rural areas, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, there may still have been a memory of freedom to roam, to glean, to fish, to hunt and to gather, and a resentment of the imposition of the exclusive property rights that were so alien to the Aborigines British occupation had displaced. 6 The empire builders were past masters at legitimising occupation – in Wales as in Tasmania.
In 1804 the new settlement had been named after Lord Hobart, the first Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, whose department was responsible for building the central machinery for the administration of the empire.7 Seven years later Governor Macquarie, whose military teeth had been cut in India, ordered the ramshackle buildings that had arisen on the site to be brought into line. His layout 'was a modified
6 Henry Reynolds indicates that such a concept of alienation and assertion of rights was
incomprehensible to the Aborigines - so perverse as to be unimaginable. It confounded the complex identifications with land based on totemic, linguistic, marital, kinship and ceremonial networks as well as the different levels of signification accorded to sites. Not only was the idea of alienating land incomprehensible, but also the idea of people alienating themselves from their land, so that in the early stages of white invaders could only be understood as returning ghosts of ancestors. Henry Reynolds, The other side of the frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia, Penguin: Ringwood, (1981) 1990, pp. 63-66, 31-22.
7
gridiron, the camp plan of hot and dusty Indian plains reinterpreted for a landscape of wood and stream'.8 It was to the town that had grown from this grid that the Constance
was headed; at this moment a cold, drenched town, a very far cry from the Indian plains.
As the water ebbed leaving mud and sand and ruined household goods, and the poor living in the low-lying areas along the estuary and rivulets were left to clean up the mess, newspapers turned their attention to the Constance and her cargo of servants for the consideration of their readers who, for the most part, lived on higher land. Under the banner 'The Emigrants per Constance', the Hobart Town Courier allotted all its editorial space over two days to the ship and her passengers. The emigrants, the paper reported, were mainly domestic servants 'described by all parties as of a very superior description, both as to usefulness and respectability of character':
Seventy virtuous young women introduced into any population – even though they may only number one to a thousand – must have an appreciable effect on its moral and social future; and this effect will of course be proportionate to the means taken for its fair development.9
The superiority, respectability and virtue of the women, and the imagined trajectories embedded in the words 'moral and social future' (the domestic ideals of marriage, childbearing and Christian rearing), suggest not only a stability of configuration that was denied them in England, but also a class elevation. These women on the ship, as yet unseen, have none of those 'deficiencies of politeness', or 'large hard hands and clumsy feet', Thackeray ascribed to the departing female emigrants at Blackwall. The ostensibly non-physical attributes of the immigrants contrast the extreme physicality of the working-class girls they had been before their voyage. The physicality, coarseness and lack of refined feeling that was assigned to their class had to be stripped away so that they could stand as icons of purity, one to one thousand, against the convicts they had been brought in to replace.
Virtue and the future weighed heavily in Tasmania at this historical moment. It was only in the last few years that the arrival of a ship had not bought with it a sense of dread among many of the free settlers. 'The hateful red flag flying at the signal staff, showing that another ship with male convicts is coming in. A thousand more of the worst among
8 Peter Bolger, Hobart Town, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973, p. 9. 9
men are expected before the end of the year', Thomas Arnold, Inspector of Schools, wrote to his mother in late 1850.10 In the 1840s transportation had become Britain's panacea for removing people whose petty crimes grew from the famine and poverty of that decade. The numbers had so increased that even Earl Grey, Secretary for the Colonies, whose policy of transportation was unrepentant, admitted in 1847 that Van Diemens Land had been 'almost ruined' by it. This ruin was of little import, though, as Canada, the Cape, Mauritius, Bermuda, New South Wales, Port Philip, New Zealand and Ceylon all refused, or for other reasons were unable to accept, convicts or expirees. Revoking a promise to end transportation to Van Diemens Land, Grey instead increased it and off-loaded convicts from other colonies, notably Gibraltar and New South Wales, to which transportation had ceased.11 His unpopularity in the colony provoked large, popular demonstrations including an effigy-burning on Hobart's Mount Knocklofty. By 1852, Arnold, like many others, decided the colony was no place to raise a family: ' The
Aboukir brought nearly 300 convicts and Lord Grey declares openly that he will continue to send them here', he wrote to his mother, ' Very well; then I for one shall leave the colony, as soon as my debts are paid'.12
For Alice Gordon and her fellow emigrants, though, this was no longer Van Diemens Land, penal colony, but Tasmania, settler colony. A symbolic line had been drawn between the past and the present on July 5, 1855, when Her Majesty Queen Victoria, summering on the Isle of Wight, prepared a proclamation of the new name,' Tasmania', strengthening the idea of an imagined English community.13 Tasmania, or at least its elite, began to identify itself more firmly as an equal player in a broader British imperial network, albeit still a child of the Mother country. 'It was ultimately conceded', James Fenton wrote in his History of Tasmania,
10 October 3, 1850 in New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold, the Younger: with further letters
from Van Diemens Land and letters of Arthur Hugh Clough, 1847-1851, ed. James Bertram, Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 193.
11 A G L Shaw, Convicts & the Colonies: a study of penal transportation from Great Britain &
Ireland to Australia & other parts of the British Empire, London: Faber and Faber, 1966, pp. 320- 21. The obvious alternative was unthinkable, viz. Lord Shaftesbury: 'The prospect of retaining our criminals in England is perfectly terrible' (p. 349). Grey argued that he would not be sending out convicts but expirees who had served a year or two in English reformatories. By 1846 there were 26 000 transportees in Van Diemens Land. Convicts made up a third of the population, or more than half with expirees. At the end of 1853 the order-in-council making Van Diemens Land a penal colony was revoked; however all the convicts on Norfolk Island were relocated to Port Arthur between 1854 and May 1856. pp. 335, 343, 351, 353.
12 12 September 1851, 25 March 1852, Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger 1850-1900, ed.
James Bertram, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1980, pp. 13, 22.
13
that the sentiment of freedom was not something peculiar to the soil of the British Isles, which lost its virtue when transplanted, but was a personal birthright which Englishmen carried with them wherever they wandered and founded communities. 14
Charles Eardley Wilmot, writing just before the change, predicted that the time had dawned when Tasmania would 'fulfil her destiny as an English colony'. English, that was, 'in everything but her geography'.15 But there was an unease about how well Tasmania could perform this role. The editorial inspired by the arrival of the Constance ascribed a refinement to the immigrants from their mere association with Englishness suggesting, in a roundabout way, that Alice Gordon and her shipmates may have been lured to the colony under false pretences:
Distance has 'lent enchantment to the view' of the country to which she has emigrated, for, without the vivid colourings of the imagination, few would voluntarily sacrifice friends, country, home and high civilised refinement, for the chance of gaining a better living by the same amount of labour, in a region of which but an insignificant proportion has been reclaimed from the wilderness.16
But it was not the wilderness that was the problem here, nor the implied notion that it might be inhabited by savages; it was the settlement or, more precisely , the white population, built on a dichotomy of convict and free, and uneasy about the blurring of those boundaries. Although nominally a free colony now, relations between master and servant were grounded in a penal past. For decades the primary system of punishment was transportation followed by assigned service. Female convicts, whose delinquency marked them as having fallen from their 'natural state', were placed in domestic service in private households where, the theory was, they could be re-formed into
submissiveness and cleanliness, ultimately to become wives of reformed male convicts. As their records attest, many female convicts resisted this project. Drunkenness, sexual misconduct, absence without leave and insolence were the most common
misdemeanours they were accused of. But they were also brought before magistrates on trumped-up charges, including pregnancies that embarrassed their employers. These
14 James Fenton, A History of Tasmania from its Discovery to the Present Time, Hobart: J Walch
and Sons, 1884, p. 280.
15 Charles Eardley Wilmot, Six Letters on Subjects of Colonial Interest, Hobart: Advertiser, 1855, p.
31.
16
women were without 'character', that essential passport of respectability for women who had to engage in paid work. Regardless of how the convict women behaved in service, the fact of their convict status cast them as dishonest, sexually promiscuous and/or violent.
The representation of convicts as debauched had received particular impetus when the Anti-transportation movement, whose primary aim was the development of an English settler society in the colony, failed to persuade the home government to cease
transportation on economic grounds or other claims of free settlers. As their frustration increased, the movement began to focus its rhetoric on the idea of moral corruption engendered by the penal system. By 1846 arguments were being presented to the home government that homosexual practices were endemic among prisoners in the probation system in the colony. A year later the rhetoric intensified with narratives of child-rape and cannibalism. It was a war waged with lectures, pamphlets and
demonstrations. In London, the Times represented Van Diemens Land as 'steeped to the lips in a concentrated mass of pollution'.17 The spectacle of a vice-ridden Van Diemens Land so skilfully created in the public imagination both in Britain and the colonies, was hard to dislodge. The very respectability sought by anti-transportationists was
compromised by the rhetoric they had chosen to achieve it.
The Constance women were required to enter employment contracts that had the potential for greater hardship than situations they had left behind. In the years of uncertainty that marked the last stages of the transportation system the relationship between master and servant became highly contested. In the final phase the women sent to the colony had been nominally expirees rather than convicts under sentence.It was a scheme that had ricocheting effects on the whole working population of the colony Tasmania. The reaction of employers to the conversion from assigned convict labour (with the benefit of the disciplinary structures of the imperial Convict
Department), to waged labour of expired convicts outside this system was to bring the already harsh Tasmanian Masters and Servants Act more closely in line with the
measures of the old assignment system, making it the most Draconian legislation of this
17 Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, vol. 1: Van Diemen's Land from the earliest times to
kind in the empire .18 The position of Master and Servant increasingly resembled that of