CLOSING
HELL’S
GATES

CLOSING
HELL’S
GATES

the death of a convict station

HAMISH MAXWELL-STEWART

First published in 2008

Copyright © Hamish Maxwell-Stewart 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: info@allenandunwin.com

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish.

Closing hell’s gates: the death of a convict station.

ISBN: 978 1 74175 149 9 (pbk.)

Convicts—Tasmania—Sarah Island—History.

Prisons—Tasmania—Sarah Island—History.

Penal colonies—Tasmania—Sarah Island—History.

Penal colonies—Tasmania—Macquarie Harbour—History.

Sarah Island (Tas.)—History—1803–1851.

Macquarie Harbour (Tas.)—History.

Macquarie Harbour Penal Settlement.

994.66

Cover and internal design by Kirby Stalgis

Index by Russell Brooks

Maps on pages viii and ix by Simon Barnard

Set in 10/13.5 pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Clare

A ship negotiating the passage through Hell’s Gates into Macquarie Harbour, with James Lucas and his crew in the foreground. (Artist unknown)

Contents

1. Pilot Station

2. Hell’s Gates

3. Liberty Point

4. Coal Head

5. Phillip’s Island

6. Brickmakers’ Bay

7. Settlement Island

8. Small Island

9. Soldiers’ Island

10. Farm Cove

11. Kelly’s Basin

12. Charcoal Burners’ Bluff

13. Birch’s Inlet

14. Gordon River

15. Lime Kiln Reach

1. Sawpits

2. Shipwright

3. Boat crew hut

4. Blacksmith

5. New penitentiary

6. Old penitentiary

7. Cook house

8. School house

9. Carpenter

10. Shoemaker

11. Warton’s and Douglas’s quarters

12. Commissariat and engineer store

13. Bakehouse

14. Tannery

15. Gaol

16. Guard house

17. Barracks

18. Chaplain’s house

19. Surgeon’s quarters

20. Commandant’s quarters

21. Lookout house

22. Mortuary

23. Hospital

24. New Sawpits

25. Gardener’s hut

26. Flagstaff

Gardens

Plots

Fences

Paths

Where men are bound both hand and foot

Fast to the fatal wood,

From mangled flesh that’s basely cut

Runs streams of British blood.

John Thompson, aged 22,
prisoner, Macquarie Harbour penal station

Detail from Thomas Scott’s 1824 map of Van Diemen’s Land showing the uncharted wilderness that surrounded Macquarie Harbour.

1

‘Pluto’s land’

At the farthest corner of an island, at the very end of the world, lies a windswept shore that was once home to some of history’s most isolated outcasts. Cut off by mountain ranges it served as a place of exile within a land of exile, a prison within a prison. Some of those who were sent there talked as though they had slipped below the crust of the earth to dwell in some terrible netherworld. They called this place ‘Pluto’s land’, after the kingdom of the Roman god who ruled over the dead. Others knew the area as Macquarie Harbour, a vast body of water that interrupted the western coast of Van Diemen’s Land. Although it may not technically have been an underworld, it was universally regarded as a sink—the rubbish pit of the British Empire.

From 1787 onwards the British transported convicted prisoners to Australia. They were sent first to New South Wales, but after the discovery that Van Diemen’s Land was separated from the mainland by Bass Strait, increasing numbers of convicts were despatched there too. Although the first detachments were sent to secure the territory as a British possession, they later became the labour force that powered the process of colonisation. Between 1803 and 1853 around 73,500 were landed in Van Diemen’s Land. They cleared timber, built houses, bridges, roads and wharves, and prepared the way for wider settlement. The work to which they were put ensured that their new environs would be far from gaol-like. Most of the convicts were not locked up at night and during the day almost all of them were set to work unencumbered by leg irons or other physical restraints. Those who encountered official wrath, however, could be transported for a second time. They were shipped to one of several penal stations of which Macquarie Harbour was perhaps the most notorious.

According to the nineteenth-century historian, John West, this far-flung region was a place ‘sacred to the genius of torture’, separated from the rest of the world by ‘impenetrable forests, skirted with an impervious thicket’. It was the lowest reach of the British penal system, a forlorn outpost where ‘every object wore the air of rigour, ferocity and sadness’. Writing nearly two decades after the Macquarie Harbour penal station had been abandoned, it was for West a place ‘associated exclusively with remembrance of inexpressible depravity, degradation and woe’, a nightmarish world where ‘man lost the aspect, and the heart of man!’

Given the difficulties of getting to Macquarie Harbour it is incredible that any convicts were shipped there. It was a remote spot, beyond the pale of colonial society. A bleak anchorage located at the back of a wind-blasted, rain-soaked shore. But between January 1822 and December 1833 some 1136 male and sixteen female prisoners were battened down below decks and shipped to this isolated station. In August 1828, at the height of the settlement, 386 prisoners were secured there on two small islands surrounded by an expanse of water, which in turn was ringed by mountain ranges. The convicts themselves immortalised the terror of the place in ‘The Cyprus Brig’, a ballad considered to be so subversive that it was said to have been suppressed:

When we landed in this colony to different masters went,
For little trifling offences boys to Hobart Town gaol were sent,
Now the second sentence we received and ordered for to be,
Sent to Macquarie Harbour, that place of tyranny.

Despite its size, Macquarie Harbour had at first escaped European attention. Flinders sailed clean past the narrow entrance in 1798. Driven by high winds, he had left a warning of the dangers of that gale-ravaged coast for the benefit of future mariners. In his journal he wrote it is ‘as dreary and as inhospitable a shore as has yet been discovered; and the great swell sufficiently announces, that the consequence of coming near it . . . with a south westerly gale and a dull sailing vessel would be to be wrecked upon it’.

James Kelly encountered better weather during his circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land in a five-oared whaleboat. After feasting on wild swan, turned into a three-decker ‘sea pie’, he pulled into the heads on 28 December 1815 and spent the next three days exploring the huge expanse of water. On his return to Hobart Town, Kelly provided the merchant T. W. Birch with some samples of timber. Birch, who had sponsored the expedition, was more than pleased with what he saw.

In order to understand why Macquarie Harbour was established as a penal station it is necessary to see the world through pre-industrial eyes. The settlement was the product of an age obsessed with timber. Late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britons admired landscapes of trees because it was from their trunks and boughs that ships were wrought. Oak trees possessed of great curved limbs, or compass timber, from which the frames and knees of vessels could be fashioned, were described as the sinews of the nation. People drank toasts to them in creamware mugs emblazoned with patriotic verses like: ‘May England’s oak produce the bark to tan the hide of Bonaparte’. A single 74-gun ship could consume over 3000 mature trees, and so nurturing the nation’s stock of timber was serious business. It is said that Admiral Collingwood carried a pocket full of acorns while on shore leave, which he would liberally distribute through the estates of his hosts. The ships that made colonisation possible—those that carried commodities like sugar, calico, tea and convicts—were made from oak.

It was thus inevitable that when Europeans surveyed Australian shores they searched for oak substitutes. In 1804, the crew of the whaler Alexander found pine logs stranded on bars at the mouth of the Huon River. Although it was clear that they had been in the water for many years, they showed little signs of rot. For men with nautical eyes it must have been an electric discovery. As the surveyor general John Oxley wrote: ‘This wood is of a fine white yellow, close grained, extremely light, and of a strong aromatic smell, and, when bit, conveys a hot pungent taste not unlike cloves. This hot quality of the wood preserves it free from worms and all other insects.’ As Kelly reported to Birch, the banks of the rivers and streams that flowed into Macquarie Harbour were full of Huon pine; it was not long before plans for future expeditions were put in place. In June 1816 the brig Sophia returned with the first commercially cut cargo of the stuff, which was soon selling in Hobart Town for the exorbitant price of sixpence a foot. The captain of the Sophia also reported that he had seen an immense stratum of coal exposed to a level of six feet at the base of a head on the northern shore of Macquarie Harbour.

Clearly Macquarie Harbour had advantages in natural resources. But its remoteness gave it an additional appeal—it was a perfect location to send dangerous recidivists. As early as 1818, Governor Macquarie had drawn up plans to turn the harbour that Kelly had named in his honour into a penal station, a place where absconders, thieves, forgers and other undesirables could be exiled to work cutting timber and mining coal until they had atoned for their crimes and indiscretions. As Macquarie confidently proclaimed, ‘escape from thence would be next to impossible’. He concluded that, as a place where the ‘worst description of convicts’ could be safely banished to labour for the public good, ‘I am inclined to think it would answer remarkably well’. Still, it was not until a further three years had elapsed that the plan was put into action. The difficulties of navigating the bar at the mouth of the harbour caused significant delays.

He instructed Lieutenant Governor William Sorell to construct a vessel of 60 to 70 tons, small enough to cross the bar at the mouth of the harbour, but of sufficient size to run supplies to a future settlement. In view of these plans, all other schemes to open up Macquarie Harbour to commercial exploitation were put on hold. When a pair of surveyors applied for permission to construct a water-powered timber mill there the application was turned down. Instead, one of them was hired to undertake a survey of Macquarie Harbour to assess its suitability as a place of punishment. Two further surveys were commissioned before the plan was finally sanctioned.

On 12 December 1821 the Sophia and the colonial brig Prince Leopold departed from the Derwent. On board was the Hobart Town harbour master, James Kelly—the man who had first navigated a whaleboat through the heads at Macquarie Harbour—and the deputy surveyor, G. W. Evans. It was their task to advise on navigation, to place marker buoys and to locate the best sources of timber and coal.

The settlement was to be commanded by Lieutenant John Cuthbertson of the 48th Regiment, a Peninsular War veteran who would also serve as magistrate. The immediate health of the small party was placed in the hands of Assistant Colonial Surgeon James Spence, a graduate of Edinburgh University, while James Lucas who had been born on Norfolk Island was appointed as pilot. The remainder of the military detachment consisted of Sergeant Waddy, an ardent Methodist who was placed in charge of the stores, and sixteen rank and file of the 48th Regiment.

The task of constructing and maintaining the new settlement would fall on 23 public works prisoners who had volunteered for the job on the promise that they would receive suitable indulgences for their services. The brute work of cutting timber and coal, hauling stone and collecting shells for lime would fall to the first contingent of secondarily transported convicts. Described as bad and incorrigible characters, there were 52 of them in all, 44 men and eight women.

On 30 December 1821 the Sophia arrived at the roadstead outside of the heads. The bulk of her stores were unloaded so she could slide safely over the bar unencumbered. Four days later she arrived at a little island fifteen miles inside the bar—the place that Evans had selected as the most suitable site for the future settlement. While it had been officially named Sarah Island after the wife of T. W. Birch, the financier of Kelly’s first expedition to the harbour, for the life of the station it was generally known as Settlement or Headquarters Island.

Cuthbertson reported that in a few days all the stores were safely landed, notwithstanding the ‘tempestuous and rainy weather’. Those who hoped that the bad weather was a phenomenon that would soon pass were to be severely disappointed—tempestuous and rainy conditions proved to be characteristic of this part of the coast.

Cuthbertson’s immediate concern, however, was the fate of the Prince Leopold. The two vessels had parted company on 17 December and she had not been sighted since. In fact the Prince Leopold had overshot the harbour mouth and, rather than turn back in the bad weather, she ran for the northern settlement at George Town on the Tamar River. During the course of the voyage a seaman named Richard Rose was killed when he slipped from the foretop sailyard and fell on the anchor stock. The vessel, too, felt the full impact of the weather—her main boom was carried clean away, the mainsail split in two and the bulwark and one of her boats were stoved in by the force of the sea. It was an eventful first passage and the battered vessel did not arrive at Macquarie Harbour until 17 February 1822. There were to be many such voyages in the years to come.

In the meantime, Evans busied himself surveying the surrounding country. He reported that the hills were ‘closely covered with heavy timber, and almost impenetrable vines and brush-wood’. In words that would have pleased Lieutenant Governor Sorell and Governor Macquarie, he described how ‘the persons sent thither can have no communication with the eastern side of the island, for so completely shut in is this part by the surrounding rugged, closely wooded, and altogether impracticable country, that escape by land is next to impossible’. It was an observation that was about to be sorely tested.

Convict gang boats returning across Macquarie Harbour with a raft of pine logs in tow. On the left is Small Island, with the notoriously draughty barracks over which the surf often broke with ‘great violence’. (Thomas Lempriere)

2

Voyage through the gates of hell

The voyage to Macquarie Harbour was an oceanic rite of passage. To be transported for a second time was to be slipped once more over the horizon. All but one of Australia’s penal stations were constructed on coasts (the exception was Wellington Valley in New South Wales). This time, however, the journey would take the convict beyond the boundary of society. The most senior member of the colonial administration ever to visit Macquarie Harbour during the life of the settlement was the colonial surveyor. No lieutenant governor ever saw its shores, nor did the colonial surgeon, or superintendent of convicts, or any architect.

It was, for the vast bulk of ‘respectable’ society, a place of mystery. Indeed, such was the extent to which it was terra incognita that elaborate drawings of the settlement had to be prepared for trials held in Hobart Town. They were necessary in order to inform the court of the geography of a landscape that its judge and jury would never see for themselves. As each secondarily convicted man and woman passed through the small hatchway in the deck they descended into a shadowy realm.

As the experience of the Prince Leopold had shown, a voyage to Macquarie Harbour was not a matter to be taken lightly. Average sailing time for a colonial vessel departing from Hobart Town was 27 days—nearly a month at sea to make a trip of less than 200 miles. By contrast, the return passage, in which the vessel had the weather in its favour, took on average just four days. Vessels sailing to Macquarie Harbour frequently had to shelter from bad weather in a series of bays and inlets before beating up the west coast with its dangerous lee shore.

The government brig Cyprus made many eventful trips to this remote posting. She may have been a pretty looking ship with a carved bust of a Highlander for a figurehead, imitation cabin windows and a yellow streak of paint on each side, but prettiness was no insurance against bad weather. She was ill-maintained as well and twice caught fire on the passage to Macquarie Harbour, a consequence of her cooking apparatus being ‘broke and wore out’. The constant troubles with the galley stove meant that those on board were sometimes ‘obliged to go without victuals daily’.

In November 1826 the Cyprus encountered such severe winds at the mouth of the Derwent after leaving Hobart Town that the master, Mr Kinghorn, decided to take her round by the east coast. She finally reached her destination after 53 days at sea, having lost an anchor at Kent’s Bay off Cape Barren Island. Even inside the bar at Macquarie Harbour she was not safe. In a thunderstorm the brig was hit by lightning which ‘shivered the top mast to pieces’. During another trip in July 1829, the Cyprus hit a heavy gale in Recherche Bay and once more lost her anchors and cables on a shoal as well as damaging her windlass. On this occasion she was forced to return to Hobart Town to be refitted. Other supply vessels were often delayed by bad weather and there were constant concerns that overdue ships had been wrecked. As many testified, the experience of sailing to this remote penal outpost could be truly terrifying.

For the convicts, battened down in the dark with nothing to sit on but heaving ballast and covered in spew and bilge water, the experience must have transcended terror. Their voyage to Macquarie Harbour started when they were removed from the gaol in Hobart Town and marched to the wharf in irons. Their legs encumbered by iron basils closed tight with rivets, each prisoner’s step was restrained by the two feet of chain that linked the fetters on their legs. The only way to move was to lift the links off the ground—a task commonly achieved by attaching a scrap of rope or cord to the central ring of the chain. As the line of prisoners progressed the sound of their irons clanking in unison rang through the streets. It was a common refrain in Hobart Town—a cacophony that heralded the approach of the damned.

Once loaded onto a colonial transport, they were mustered on deck in two ranks and inspected, usually by a non-commissioned officer of the detachment that would guard them during the voyage. It was his duty to check that ‘they were as clean as circumstances would permit’ and that their irons were in order. Each prisoner was paraded in front of the senior official on board while their names were called and then one by one they were fed through a hatchway into the ship’s prison. While this ritual took place the military detachment stood by with bayonets fixed. The routine was designed as much for psychological effect as for reasons of security.

The space that the prisoner descended into was a small section of the brig divided by bulwarks from the rest of the hold and the forecastle where the military detachment were quartered. The convicts were kept in irons for the whole of the voyage. The space in which they were confined was not high enough for them to stand upright, but they could stretch out on the deck of the hold, if there was one, huddled in the one blanket doled out to every prisoner. It would be small comfort on that terrible passage.

As each brig and schooner ploughed into the trough of a wave before riding up and rolling off the crest of the next, the prisoners in the hold rolled with the vessel in their pitch-dark hell. In rough weather they were slammed from side-to-side amid the stench of vomit and the contents of the ‘nuisance tub’. On some vessels the hold was not decked and the prisoners were forced to lie on ballast. In many cases they were half naked, having traded their clothes for tobacco and other small luxuries in Hobart Town gaol.

Sometimes the space in which they lay was further cramped by stores that were placed in the ship’s prison since no room could be found for them elsewhere. A supply of 98 sheets of tin tied up in bale wrapping was conveyed to the settlement like this in the Cyprus. During the voyage the prisoners urinated on it and it became so thoroughly soaked that the sheets rusted and over half had to be condemned. In May 1823, six prisoners were charged with stealing vinegar from the stores on board the Waterloo—their desperate attempt to wipe out the memory of the passage by getting drunk. Five of them were given 25 lashes.

The Waterloo appears to have been particularly prone to on-board thefts. In October 1826, William Murray and Charles Newman, two absconders from Maria Island, were sentenced to be flogged for pilfering trousers from a bale of clothing which had been part of the cargo, probably as they lacked suitable clothes of their own. Two days later, Murray was sentenced to a further 60 lashes and to serve in chains in the gaol gang for stealing pork—presumably from a cask that they had broken open. Three other prisoners were sentenced to 48 lashes and hard labour for the same offence.

When conditions permitted the convicts were allowed up on deck to jangle their irons in the space before the windlass as they breathed in fresh air under the watch of the detachment. During the entire passage a soldier stood constant guard over the prison hatchway. In calmer weather two further sentries were placed on deck, ‘the one on one side returning with his face toward the prison, at the time the other was going in the opposite direction’.

Perhaps it was fitting that the last leg of that terrible voyage would take the convict through the gates of hell itself. The west coast of Van Diemen’s Land had one of the worst lee shores in the world with a prevailing wind that bore down (frequently with a savage intensity) on a jagged shoreline. The waves that slammed into that coast had started their journey more than halfway round the globe off the shores of South America. Unobstructed over such a vast oceanic distance the swell could build to frightening proportions.

The heads of Macquarie Harbour were both narrow and, at one and a half fathoms, or nine feet, dangerously shallow. The channel could only be negotiated at high tide for at other times a current of six or seven knots rushed through. A pilot was needed to steer each vessel into the relative safety of the harbour.

The first glimpse of Macquarie Harbour penal station was of the pilot’s house and the cluster of buildings where his boat crew and a small military detachment were quartered. Along the shore, pigs roamed between the bleached bones of slaughtered whales. At the back of the weatherboard houses beds for growing potatoes stretched up the slope of the hill. Fertilised with rotting kelp, they must have given the place an Atlantic look, as though it really belonged on the shores of Donegal or the edge of some Hebridean island.

The heads at Macquarie Harbour were originally named Hell’s Gates, not because they marked the entrance to the penal hell beyond, but because they were a navigational hazard of infernal dimensions. It was the pilot’s job to thread each colonial vessel across the shallow bar and through the narrow channel scoured by surging tidal currents. If the weather was rough the supply vessels had to wait outside of the bar for calmer conditions, attached to a mooring. Two anchors of between 1500 and 2000 pounds in weight had been commissioned for the purpose in the King’s Yard in Sydney. They were attached to fifteen fathoms of strong chain that in turn were linked to a bridle ring. A further twelve fathoms of good fourteen inch ‘European’ cable was required to secure the ring to a buoy. Without this mooring there could be no hope of maintaining the penal station. It permitted a vessel to ride out the worst that the southern ocean could throw at it. When the weather subsided and the tide was right the pilot was conveyed out to the waiting ship.

For much of the life of the settlement, the pilot was a man named James Lucas, who had been born on Norfolk Island in 1792. The son of Lieutenant James Hunt Lucas of the New South Wales Corps and the convict Sarah Greggs, he had already served in the Royal Navy—first in the Buffalo and then for two years as second and chief officer on the brig Kangaroo and for four years in His Majesty’s brig Elk. As he later wrote, the hardships of shipboard life had made him ‘familiar’ with the dangers of the job, and dangers there certainly were. As Lucas himself wrote to the colonial secretary, ‘I am at all times exposed to numerous accidents and on many occasions I have narrowly escaped with my life’. He suffered a particularly serious injury in May 1828 when he was sucked under a boat in heavy seas, while unsuccessfully attempting to rescue a sailor who had been knocked overboard while lowering the topgallant yard in a gale. Four years earlier he had been lucky to survive when the pilot’s boat was upset at the heads, an accident in which four of his boat crew had drowned. Such were the perils of life on a coast where the sea on a calm day had a swell as great as that on the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land in a gale.

The men who manned the whaleboat that brought Lucas out to the waiting brig—and shared with him the daily dangers—were all secondarily transported convicts. Many were sailors with experience that spanned the breadth of the Atlantic. Thomas Day, for example, had been born a slave in Spanish Town, Jamaica, but had contrived to forge a certificate of freedom and escape to sea. Others who were colonially born had been brought up with boats, since the areas first colonised by Europeans were invariably close to estuaries, and water remained for long the principal means of communication. As he too was a ‘native’, Lucas had taken it upon himself to watch over the handful of ‘currency lads’, as the native born were commonly termed, and many of the colonial youth who found their way to Macquarie Harbour ended up in his boat.

John Popjoy, a transported seaman from London who served as Lucas’s coxswain, placed his faith in a more divine protector. He was tattooed on his upper right arm with the talismanic verse:

Rocks, hills and sands,
and barren lands,
kind fortune set me free,
from roaring guns and women’s tongues,
O Lord deliver me.

For additional insurance he had caused the words: ‘From rocks and shoals and every hill, may God protect the sailor still’ to be added below the elbow. Surmounting these was a picture of a sailor, a woman, an anchor and a crucifix, the last two being the signs of hope and salvation. As a device it failed to protect him. He was drowned in December 1833 when the ship he was on was blown onto a sandbank near Boulogne in the English Channel.

According to the Quaker missionaries Backhouse and Walker, who visited the Australian colonies in the early 1830s, the prisoners who passed through the heads into Macquarie Harbour despaired of salvation or hope. They reported that convicts ‘recklessly’ asserted that Hell’s Gates was so named as ‘all who entered in hither, were doomed to eternal perdition’. It was perhaps an inevitable presumption—nomenclature informed the traveller, both bond and free, that to pass through the entrance to Macquarie Harbour was to enter an earthly hell, an allusion reinforced by the topography of the place.

The colonial historian, John West, borrowed the ‘awful colouring of Milton’s Paradise Lost’ to describe the region:

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things.
Abominable, UNUTTERABLE!

The landscape that enclosed Macquarie Harbour defied the surveyor. Protected by folded mountain ranges, fast flowing rivers, high rainfall and large areas of temperate rainforest, it was difficult to map and thus knowledge about it could not be captured in black and white. The chart drawn up by Thomas Scott, the assistant surveyor general, and engraved in Edinburgh in 1824, depicts Macquarie Harbour as a body of water surrounded by a void. In places around the edges of the harbour there are occasional annotations: ‘Rocky and barren shore without wood’, ‘Perpendicular cliffs’, ‘High rocky mountains’—words that confirm that, as far as colonial men of power were concerned, the land was a wilderness.

Naming is one of the great symbolic acts of the colonist. Through naming, landscapes are converted into the cultural and literal property of the coloniser. Survey maps were powerful as they could capture a place on paper and remove it to a ‘centre of calculation’ where ownership could be legally confirmed. The country that surrounded Macquarie Harbour resisted this process. The boundaries of the penal station were restricted to the waterways that could be charted by vessels and a number of islands and other areas that had been cleared of timber by convict labour.

The limits of the settlement can be traced in the names imposed on the landscape. On the south side of Macquarie Harbour a series of small streams bear the names of Lucas the pilot, Schofield the Wesleyan catechist and the commandants Butler, Baylee, Briggs and Cuthbertson. On the other side of the mouth of the Gordon River there is a bay named after Commandant Wright and, flowing into the lower reaches of the river itself, are tributaries named after the assistant colonial surgeons Barnes and Spence. Further up beyond Limestone Reach there is another rivulet named after Kinghorn, master of the brigs Cypress and Waterloo, and a little after that an island which sits midstream in the river that bears the name of Commandant Butler. The furthest extremity of the penal station is marked by a waterfall named after the commissariat officer Thomas Lempriere. Beyond this point the Gordon River ceases to be navigable with ease and, cartographically speaking, the country faded into the great blanks of Scott’s map.

This does not mean that it was country unknown to all. When James Kelly had ‘discovered’ Macquarie Harbour the country on the south side of the heads had been ablaze and he had heard ‘a large number of natives shouting and making a great noise, as if they were hunting kangaroo’. So worried had he and his party been about the possibility of attack from the Mimegin people who inhabited the area that they had camped out on an island. If there was an Aboriginal presence in the northern reaches of the harbour then Europeans failed to report it.

It is possible that the Mimegin rarely journeyed into the country on the north side, although they certainly possessed the means to do so. They regularly crossed the neck of Macquarie Harbour on catamarans, as did the peoples further north who moved on annual migrations as far south as Port Davey. It seems likely that the Mimegin visited Birch’s Inlet in winter to collect eggs. The first Europeans to penetrate into the harbour reported vast flocks of swans there. The country from Birch’s River to the coast was less thickly timbered and may have been cleared with firesticks to create hunting grounds similar to those that Kelly observed near the heads.

Most of the year, however, the Mimegin lived close to the coast where crustaceans and shellfish were abundant. The surface waters of Macquarie Harbour have a low salt content and few marine shellfish are to be found along its shores. There is a species of mussel that infests the rocks in some areas, but it is too small to be of any practical use as a food source. Any convict contemplating absconding would encounter the same problem. Compared to the ocean coasts, the shores of Macquarie Harbour presented lean pickings—they were a natural culinary wilderness.

In biblical terms, the counterpoint of Eden is the ‘wilderness’, a place to which those who had encountered God’s displeasure were banished. Macquarie Harbour must have felt like such a place, especially when the convicts who had been exiled to that wilderness were sometimes literally called upon to haul themselves into their own place of penal servitude. When the winds failed, colonial vessels were ‘warped’ or ‘kedged’ through the heads, a process that involved loading an anchor into a boat and rowing it some distance ahead of the vessel where it was dumped overboard. The prisoners were then ordered to man the capstan, winding the anchor cable so that the brig was slowly winched until it came to rest over the anchorage point and the whole process could be started again.

On such calm days the waters of Macquarie Harbour could appear to be made of glass. Stained by tannins leeched out of button grass, the harbour was the colour of tea and in still conditions its surface perfectly reflected the trees, hills and mountains that bounded its edges. As a body of water it was vast—twice as big as Sydney Harbour, or Port Jackson as it was then known.

The first view that the brig had of the two small islands that lay at the heart of the settlement came when it rounded Liberty Point. In this there was an irony. Like Hell’s Gates, Liberty Point originally got its name for reasons that had nothing to do with the penal station. James Kelly, the first person to attempt to chart Macquarie Harbour, had brought with him some black swans that he had captured further south at Port Davey. Seeing that there were plenty of swans in the harbour, he set four of the birds he had previously taken captive free, naming the adjacent headland in honour of the occasion. Once the penal station had been established, the name of this point of land took on a new meaning. It marked the route to freedom, the first landmark that each colonial vessel passed on its return passage to Hobart Town.

The main settlement at Macquarie Harbour was located on Sarah Island. To the north was a much smaller outcrop of rock which Kelly had named Grummet, probably after the ring used to fasten the edge of a sail to its stay. The name was inspired by the prominent cave that interrupted the eastern face of the island. The allusion, however, may have masked a more earthy pun. Grummet was also nineteenth-century slang for female genitalia. During the era of the penal station, however, both of these names were rarely used. Sarah Island, as mentioned previously, was instead referred to as Headquarters or Settlement Island—names which were useful in that they underscored the extent of the penal establishment which stretched from the pilot station beyond the heads, to various outstations on the shores of the harbour and the lime burners’ and timber cutters’ camps far up the Gordon River. For its part, Grummet was more commonly known as Small Island, a name that graphically conveyed the extent to which it was dwarfed by the vast expanse of water surrounding it.

From afar, Settlement Island presented quite a spectacle. The timber on the slopes had been cleared shortly after the station had been founded to make way for vegetable gardens. This had exposed the island to the full force of the winds that whipped down the length of the harbour. Cuthbertson had ordered fences to be erected to break the passage of the gales but, as Lieutenant Wright his successor complained, these were blown down ‘almost daily’. Over the next five years an ever more elaborate network of defences was constructed, which included a 26-foot-high, two-foot-thick barrier at the back of the shipyard. This wooden palisade was buttressed by substantial logs that jutted out into the land and sea like a malevolent crown of thorns. From a distance, the effect must have been daunting. When first glimpsed from Liberty Point, nine miles up the harbour, the settlement presented ‘the appearance of a walled castle, the Small Island looking like a detached fort’. At points the effect was accentuated by fake crenellations and the turret-like protuberance of the new penitentiary.

But even before these structures were added, the island must have looked like a windswept fortress guarding the upper reaches of the harbour. The analogy is appropriate since these wooden walls did not just battle the wind, they extended inward crisscrossing the settlement and enclosing the entire island. They cut off the area in which the officers resided from the bakehouse and tannery. They separated the stores and boat pond from the penitentiary where the prisoners slept, and their stout stockading ringed the lumberyard and gaol. They stamped the mark of property and power over the surface of the island in a manner that would have been impressive if it had not been so comprehensively overshadowed by the scale of the wild untrammelled commons that surrounded this small fortified penal outpost.

When a brig finally arrived after its long passage the retransported were disembarked at Settlement Island where the irons were struck off their feet. Suddenly unencumbered, and without the rolling motion of the sea beneath them, it must have appeared as if they were drunk. When there was spare slop clothing in the store (‘slops’ being the term used to describe what passed for a government uniform) new articles were issued and the prisoners’ old clothes burnt, infused as they were with the stench of the floating prison to which they had been confined.

According to official returns, each prisoner was entitled to two issues of clothing a year. In summer they were kitted out in a frock (a loose overall with sleeves such as those worn by farm workers) and trousers made of duck, a stiff and durable form of canvas, and a cotton shirt and a pair of shoes. While they were allowed four pairs of shoes a year, their clothing had to last until winter, when they were supplied with a jacket and trousers made of wool and a fresh shirt. This would have meant that each man had no spare set of clothes. The records do not specify the articles of clothing issued to the female convicts at Macquarie Harbour, but these probably differed little from those issued elsewhere in the colony: a jacket, skirt, shifts and a calico cap were standard, although some prisoners also received an apron and handkerchiefs to wear round their necks.

As early as February 1823 the settlement surgeon had reported that a supply of good ‘necessaries’ would ward off dysentery and rheumatism. He recommended that upon arrival every prisoner should be allocated his winter and summer allowance, which would have provided each man with two sets of clothing. In addition, he argued for the provision of a neckcloth, a cap to ward off the rain and a blanket and palliasse, a form of thin straw-filled mattress. Spare clothes may have been issued as a reward to some prisoners, but as others were forced to sleep in wet gear it is apparent that this was never applied as a general rule.

The slops issued to the prisoners were of different colours. Some were yellow, others grey, brown and blue. It was usual for trousers and jackets of different colours to be supplied to the same man—the choice being dependent on what was in the store at the time. At other stations it was common practice to mark each article of clothing with the insignia of the station to which the convict had been consigned. Thus prisoners stationed in the prison barracks in Hobart Town could be distinguished by the prominent P.B. stencilled in paint on the knees of their trousers and the backs of their jackets. At Macquarie Harbour there was no need to take such measures. It was obvious which station each prisoner belonged to, the nearest other being the government timber felling and sawing establishment at Birch’s Bay in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel south of Hobart Town. Items of clothing were marked, however, with the initials B.O. (which stood for Board of Ordnance) and a broad arrow to distinguish them as government property. Other than that their slops were anything but uniform.

Once equipped, new prisoners were ranked up and given a long lecture by the commandant during which the settlement rules, and the consequences of breaking them, were spelled out. After this they were shipped across the short expanse of water to the Small Island where all new arrivals, excepting those who were aged or infirm or had arrived with special recommendations, were housed for a probationary period.

This barren skerry was by all accounts a cramped and miserable place. It had originally been the site of the settlement hospital—it was widely held in the early nineteenth century that stagnant air was the source of much ill health and that it was important to house the sick in places exposed to purifying draughts. Since the hospital was largely staffed by female prisoners, they too had originally been barracked on Small Island. Exposed to the elements and difficult to access, the hospital was soon moved to a new site behind the windbreak fence on the western side of Settlement Island.

The old rudimentary building constructed of green timber in which the sick had originally been housed was converted into a penitentiary. Accessed by a steep roadway that curved up the southern side of the rock, it contained four rooms. The furthest two, surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs, were dormitories where the men were locked up at night. Adjoining these, and guarding the approach, were the constables’ quarters and a kitchen staffed by two cooks. Each room was equipped with a fireplace and a small window that looked out on the leeward side of the island. To place openings in the other wall would have been totally impractical as it would have let in the very worst of the weather. As things were, the barracks was notoriously draughty and during storms, ‘the surf often broke over it with great violence’. Newly arrived convicts shared their quarters with a number of old hands who had been placed in leg irons and barracked on Small Island as punishment. As a result the rooms of the Small Island penitentiary were often so crowded that the men could not sleep on their backs, but had to huddle together side on to each other.

Many of the prisoners in chains at Macquarie Harbour were double-ironed—two sets of three-pound leg irons were riveted to their ankles. These could not be removed without striking the rivet head off. For this reason prisoners were issued with trousers that buttoned up and down the sides—since this was the only way that they could undress. The prisoners in the chain gang slept, ate and worked in irons for the period that they had been sentenced to wear them. Thus encumbered they were imprisoned by simple physics as escape by swimming was impossible. It was as effective a system of incarceration as could have been devised within the limitations of the available technology.

There was no water on the island, apart from that which could be collected in rain barrels or butts, and this supply had to be augmented with water brought over from the mainland in casks. Firewood also had to be supplied on a daily basis—although this, like the timbers used to construct the barracks, was selected from wood that would not float in order to thwart the machinations of would-be raft-makers. After a failed attempt in early 1827 to construct a raft from two water butts and a night tub, these too were removed. A large water cask was instead cemented with masonry into the rock in such a fashion that any attempt to remove it would result in it falling to pieces. The night vessels were replaced with iron tar barrels that had been cut in half.

The cookhouse was staffed by a man named James Cock. He had served in the armed forces and for his pains had lost his right leg below the knee. It was commonplace for cooks on board ships to be ‘dismasted’ men, since there were few other jobs that they could perform; thus it was that deformity proved a blessing for Cock. He had nearly swung from the Hobart Town gallows after he had been sentenced to death in the supreme court for forging a promissory note and ‘uttering and publishing’ it as true. Transported to Macquarie Harbour instead, he had been placed in the cookhouse since he was unfit for heavier duties.

For a long time, Cock’s assistant was Felix Patehouse. Originally born in Malta, Patehouse had been sentenced to life transportation by a Court Martial in Messina in 1818 for desertion. Once in Australia he had kept on running and, like so many other absconders, got caught and ended up being sent to Macquarie Harbour.

Each morning before they proceeded to their daily labours, the prisoners on Small Island were served a breakfast of about a pint and a half of ‘skilly’. The settlement commissariat officer described this as ‘a kind of hasty pudding composed of flour, water and salt’. Patehouse was twice punished for concealing oatmeal on Small Island—he once tried to stash 15 quarts or 30 pints of the stuff—and it seems that oatmeal was substituted for flour on at least some occasions. Described by Commandant Wright as a great rascal, the Maltese cook dished this hot, but otherwise unappetising slop out to each mess with wrists tattooed with bracelets and arms bedecked with angels and crucifixes.

After breakfast had been served, Cock and Patehouse lit a signal fire. This was the sign for the gang boat to come over and ferry the men to the main settlement for morning muster. From among the ganged convicts one was selected on rotation to stay and act as ‘delegate’. This was considered to be a great privilege and was counted as a day of rest. The role of the delegate was to help collect the rations delivered from the commissariat store, to transport the wood and water delivered by boat up the steep roadway to the barracks, and to stack and light the fires in preparation for the evening meal. For his pains he got a share of the slush skimmed from the top of the meat boiler—a benefit that had long been established as the cook’s perk.

There was no jetty on Small Island, and the prisoners had to wade through the water in order to clamber on board the 12-ton launch sent over each morning to collect them. When the sea ran heavy the launch would be compelled to hold fast offshore and those who could not swim, or who were wearing irons, were hauled on board with a rope. It could be a dangerous operation. On one occasion a launch was lost when it struck a rock on the return trip, a misfortune that the commandant blamed on the crew being ‘fresh water sailors’.

While the Small Island prisoners were loaded on board, a light whaleboat with three soldiers and a handpicked crew kept watch at ‘a pistol shot’ distance. Every soldier at Macquarie Harbour was equipped with a pouch made from kangaroo skin that contained ten cartridges. They were instructed to carry these at all times and, in addition, their weapons had to be constantly loaded. As a result, the rate at which charges were expended was prodigious.

Every time a flintlock was loaded the cartridge was effectively destroyed. The whole process of clearing a Brown Bess musket was an elaborate operation. Each corporal was equipped with a tool called a worm—a type of corkscrew that could be threaded onto the end of a ramrod. By this means the remains of the paper cartridge that had been rammed down the muzzle of the weapon to provide compression, and the lead ball, could be extracted. The remaining powder could be cleared by pulling the trigger and igniting the charge in the pan. Black powder is highly hydroscopic, and given the wet conditions at Macquarie Harbour, weapons must have been constantly loaded and unloaded to check that they remained effective. While the men from Small Island waited in wet clothes huddled under the cover of the sawpits for the sound of the morning bell, the soldiers of the detachment fired the charges in their weapons in the barrack yard so that no prisoner could be in any doubt that the muskets with which they were guarded were loaded and dangerous.