The Impossible Contract

A young man arrives in Van Diemen’s Land. Within weeks he is sent to a distant paddock to watch a flock of sheep. He has no dog, no weapon, and no experience with livestock — he is a casual labourer from East Stonehouse, Plymouth, a busy maritime port in Devon, when he was arrested for housebreaking, found guilty and sentenced to seven years transportation. He spends four months on the ship, arrives in Hobart in late November and is still getting his bearings in a strange country. Shortly after his arrival, he is sent out on assignment and is handed his instructions: don’t lose any sheep. Then he is left alone.

This is the story of John Long, assigned as a shepherd in Van Diemen’s Land interior in early 1831. It is also the story of hundreds of convict workers across the colony who were placed in an arrangement that looked, on its surface, like employment — but was something quite different.

A Job Without the Means to Do It

The assignment system that governed convict labour in Van Diemen’s Land gave settlers access to workers at almost no cost. In return, masters were expected to provide food, clothing, shelter, and some basic supervision. Convicts were expected to work, to follow orders, and – critically – to be responsible for whatever was in their care.

For a shepherd, that meant the sheep.

The problem was that a shepherd in the Van Diemen’s Land interior faced threats he could not control and had no means to counter. Other people crept in at night and took a sheep. Aboriginal people, whose land this had recently been, helped themselves to stock they had no reason to regard as anyone else’s property. Native predators like wedge-tailed eagles and feral dogs took their share. A shepherd alone in a paddock with just a rough hut, no gun and no dog could not prevent any of this.

When the master returned a week later and counted the flock, the missing sheep had to be accounted for. The accounting almost always went the same way. The shepherd was responsible for the sheep. The sheep were gone. Therefore, the shepherd had failed.

John Long was found short by twenty sheep. He was charged with neglect of duty and sentenced to nine months prison with hard labour.

The Rigged Ledger

What makes this more than simple cruelty is the structure underneath it. The assignment system created an arrangement in which the master bore no risk at all.

If the sheep were tended well and the flock thrived, the master profited. If sheep went missing, to thieves, to predators, to bad weather, the convict was punished. There was no mechanism for a convict to say this was not my fault, no investigation into what had actually happened, no consideration of whether the shepherd had been given the tools or authority to prevent the loss. The punishment followed the outcome, not the fault.

This was not an accidental feature of the system. It was enormously convenient. Losses that would otherwise represent a business risk to the master became, instead, occasions to punish the workforce. The convict absorbed the cost of every mishap, whether or not he had caused it.

We might call this accountability without authority: the convict was held fully responsible for outcomes he had no power to prevent. Or, more plainly: an impossible contract. The terms required him to achieve what he was not equipped to achieve, and the penalty for failure was certain.

The Hostage Arrangement

For convicts who had formed families, the situation was grimmer still.

Under the assignment system, a married convict with children had something to lose beyond his own skin. Some masters recognised this and used it deliberately: if you behave, your family stays together. If you do not, your wife is reassigned, your children go to the orphan school, even though both their parents are alive and present.

The resources a convict in this position received: a cottage, steady work, relative stability, were not provided in any spirit of fairness or reciprocity. They were leverage. The family itself became the enforcement mechanism, more effective than flogging because a man might endure his own suffering but could not endure watching his children taken away for reasons beyond his control.

This was not an informal understanding. Masters had the legal authority to break up convict families, and magistrates would support them in exercising it as a matter of colonial discipline.

What the System Made of John Long

John Long served his time in the prison and public works gang. When he came out, his situation was unchanged: still a convict, still in a colony where his labour could be directed and his failures punished, still with no path to anything better.

He absconded. By October 1833 he had been sentenced to a further six months at the Bridgewater chain gang for absconding from his road party. Somewhere in all of this he had found others in the same position, and together they went further. Long, along with three other men: George Robinson, William Aspinall, and John Hagin, broke into the house of John Langford and robbed it. They were also strongly suspected of robbing the Launceston mail, though they were tried for the burglary rather than the mail robbery.

All four were convicted at the Hobart Supreme Court in December 1833. Judge Montagu was unsparing. He told them the government had come to a determination to enforce the strict letter of the law, and that he could not hold out to them the most remote prospect of reprieve.

John Long and George Robinson were executed on 24 December 1833:  Christmas Eve. Hagin and Aspinall were given a last minute reprieve and were was transported to Norfolk Island for life.

John Long had not arrived in the colony as a violent criminal. He had arrived as a young man transported for a first offence, and something minor enough that it earned him assignment straight away, rather than the more punitive end of the convict system. The labourer who was told he was now a shepherd, who lost twenty sheep he could not have saved, who was punished for others’ thefts, who emerged from the chain gang to find himself still trapped: that man then made choices that ended his life on the gallows at twenty-three.

But the choices were made in a system that had already decided what he was worth, and what he owed, and what would happen when he could not pay.

John Long was executed in Van Diemen’s Land on 24 December 1833, convicted of burglary and robbery in a dwelling house. He is one of 523 confirmed executions documented in Speaker for the Dead, a forthcoming history of capital punishment in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania, 1806–1946.

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Norfolk Island — a brief timeline

~1200 CE: People from Polynesia were the first to inhabit Norfolk Island, arriving around 1200 CE. By the time the British arrived in 1788 the Polynesians had gone.

6 March 1788 – 15 February 1814: First Settlement. The British established Norfolk Island as an auxiliary penal settlement in 1788, expecting to exploit the island’s flax and pine for shipbuilding. These materials proved unsuitable and the settlement was abandoned in 1814.

6 June 1825 – 1853: Second Settlement. The British Government instructed New South Wales Governor Thomas Brisbane to re-establish Norfolk Island as a penal settlement for convicts in the Australian colonies who had reoffended — transported convicts who had committed further offences in the colonies.

1 September 1844 – May 1855: Administration transferred to Van Diemen’s Land. On 1 September 1844 the administration of Norfolk Island was passed to Van Diemen’s Land (later named Tasmania). The penal settlement was finally closed in 1853 and the remaining convicts under sentence were transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

On the morning of 1 July 1846, approximately thirty convicts on Norfolk Island rose in revolt. Within hours, four convict constables were dead and the settlement was in crisis. The subsequent trials resulted in twelve executions: the largest mass execution in the history of the Australian colonies.

The immediate cause was a cooking pot.

Norfolk Island’s Second Settlement, established in 1825, was the most feared destination in the Australian colonial penal system. It was reserved for convicts who had already been transported and had reoffended: men the system had processed through every other instrument of punishment available and found still ungovernable. The Island sits eleven hundred kilometres northeast of Sydney in the Pacific Ocean. There was no escape. The ocean was the wall.

By 1846 the settlement was under the command of Major Joseph Childs, who had been instructed by the British government to impose stricter discipline on a population that had, under his predecessor Alexander Maconochie, experienced four years of relative humanity.

Maconochie had believed that punishment without hope produced men with nothing to lose. He had introduced a system of earned privileges, reduced flogging dramatically, allowed the men to celebrate the Queen’s birthday with games and festivities. He also permitted the convicts to work their own small garden plots so they could grow vegetables to supplement their salt meat and bread diet and prevent scurvy. The colonial administration considered this treatment dangerously soft. Maconochie was removed in 1844 and his reforms dismantled.

Childs restored order through discipline. He withdrew privileges for good behaviour, abolished garden plots, extended working hours, and reduced rations. In June 1846 a visiting inspector submitted a damning report on the deteriorating conditions at the settlement. The British government’s response was to instruct Childs to impose even stricter discipline. In response he prohibited all personal cooking: all provisions were to be prepared only in the general cookhouse. On the evening of 30 June 1846, after the men had been locked into their barracks for the night, Childs ordered that the men’s personal cookpots be removed and locked in the barracks storeroom without their knowledge.

This requires a moment’s explanation. The cookpots were not government issue. They were personal possessions — among the very few things a convict on Norfolk Island could call his own. They also served a vital practical purpose. Norfolk Island was plagued by endemic dysentery, and individual cookpots allowed men to prepare and eat their own portion of food separately, reducing the spread of disease that came with shared cooking arrangements. The personal cookpots stood between the men and illness as much as between them and hunger.

At breakfast the next morning, 1 July 1846, the men discovered their cookpots had been removed on the orders of Commandant Childs. Furious, they forced open the barracks storeroom, retrieved their cookpots, and prepared their meal. But the anger did not subside with the eating. A large group of men rose in revolt, attacking convict overseers, convict constables, and headed for the Magistrate.

It did not take long for the military based on the island to respond and suppress the uprising.

Those killed were convict constables John Morris, John Dinon, and Thomas Saxton, and cookhouse overseer Stephen Smith.

All of the convicts were lined up for muster and inspected one by one for signs of blood and violence. Almost sixty men were isolated as suspects and kept under close guard in a stone-built boat shed, secured to the walls with leg irons.

A Commission of Inquiry held through the afternoon reduced the group committed for trial to twenty-seven. The newly arrived Judge Burgess, who was to hear the case, was struck down with dysentery and returned to Hobart. Further investigations reduced the group to fourteen: four charged with the murder of John Morris and ten with being accessories to that murder.

The replacement judge, Fielding Browne, arrived on the island and on 23 September 1846 commenced the trials of the fourteen men. The jury consisted of five Army officers. All the accused pleaded not guilty. Evidence was heard over two weeks. Each of the accused was permitted to call witnesses in their defense. With everyone already on the island, there was no difficulty in assembling them.

Twelve men were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Two men — John Morton and William Lloyd — were acquitted.

Those found guilty of murder were John Davis, Samuel Kenyon, Dennis Pendergrast, and William Westwood. Those found guilty of being accessories to murder were James Cairnes, Owen Commuskey, Lawrence Kavenagh, Edward McGinnis, William Pearson, William Pickthorne, William Scrimshaw, and Henry Whiting.

On 13 October 1846, twelve men were hanged on Norfolk Island in two groups of six, at the gallows in front of the newly built gaol.

A new commandant was appointed to Norfolk Island: John Price. He became the most feared figure in the settlement’s history, whose methods were so brutal that he was eventually murdered by former prisoners on the Victorian mainland in 1857, two years after Norfolk Island closed.

The cookpot story is not simply a curiosity. It is a precise illustration of how the colonial punishment system worked — and how it failed. Alexander Maconochie had demonstrated that men given hope, given dignity, given something to work toward, responded with better behaviour. The administration dismantled his reforms and replaced them with stricter discipline. The stricter discipline produced a revolt. The revolt produced twelve executions and the appointment of an even more brutal commandant. At no point did anyone in authority ask what the cookpots meant to the men who owned them, or what removing them would cost.

The ruins of the Norfolk Island Second Settlement are still there, accessible by boat from the island’s main wharf. The cookpots are long gone.

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When the British established a penal colony at Sullivan’s Cove in 1804, they brought with them not just convicts and soldiers, but the full apparatus of British criminal justice — including its most visible instruments of punishment and deterrence.

Among the first structures erected in the new settlement were the gallows and the gibbet. Both stood on Hunter Island, at what is now the intersection of Hunter Street and Franklin Wharf, in front of Macquarie Wharf 1. The location was entirely deliberate. Every convict ship that arrived at the settlement unloaded its human cargo directly onto Hunter Island. The first thing newly arrived convicts saw as they stepped ashore in Van Diemen’s Land was a reminder of what awaited those who broke the law.

What was a gibbet?

A gibbet was a gallows-type structure from which the bodies of executed criminals were hung on public display. Sometimes it was a purpose-built iron cage, shaped roughly like a human body, in which the corpse was encased and left to decompose in public view. The intention was to extend the punishment beyond death — to make the criminal’s end visible, and to leave it visible for as long as possible as a warning to others.

Bodies were sometimes coated in tar to slow decomposition and prolong the display. Some remained on the gibbet for years. The stench and spectacle were considerable. Many people found gibbeted bodies offensive and believed the decomposing corpses spread disease. Others felt that hanging by the neck until dead was punishment enough, without the additional indignity of public display afterwards. The practice was nonetheless common in England and its colonies from the medieval period through to the early nineteenth century, and was considered an appropriate response to serious crime.

In earlier centuries, live gibbeting also occurred — the condemned was placed alive in a metal cage and left to die of thirst or exposure. By the colonial period in Australia this practice had long ceased, but the posthumous display of executed criminals remained in use.

The Murder Act 1752

Gibbeting was formally codified in British law by the Murder Act of 1752 — formally titled An Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder (25 Geo. 2. c. 37). The Act was passed in response to a moral panic about rising murder rates in London, fuelled largely by press coverage of several homicides in late 1751 and early 1752. Parliament moved quickly, and the Act became law on 26 March 1752.

The Act’s key provisions added what it described as further terror and peculiar mark of infamy to the punishment of death for murder. It mandated that the body of every convicted murderer be either dissected and anatomised by surgeons, or left intact and hung in chains — and that in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be buried, unless it has been dissected and anatomised. The relevant sections of the Act read as follows:

“That from and after the first day of Easter term, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and fifty two, all persons who shall be found guilty of wilful murder, be executed according to law, on the day next but one after sentence passed…”

“…the body of such murderer so convicted shall…be immediately conveyed by the sheriff…and be delivered to such person as the said company shall depute or appoint…and the body so delivered to the said company of Surgeons, shall be dissected and anatomized by the said Surgeons…”

“…it shall be in the power of any such judge or justice to appoint the body of any such criminal to be hung in chains: but that in no case whatsoever the body of any murderer shall be suffered to be buried; unless after such body shall have been dissected and anatomized as aforesaid.”

The full text of the Murder Act 1752 is available at the Statutes Project: https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1751-25-geo2-c37-murder-act/

The Act remained on the statute books until 1832, when it was largely repealed and replaced by the Anatomy Act, which created a legal supply of cadavers for medical research through other means. The dissection provision had an important side effect that was not entirely unintended — it gave surgeons and anatomists a legal source of bodies for medical training at a time when cadavers were extremely difficult to obtain. Body snatching from graveyards was widespread before the Act, and the legitimate supply of executed criminals’ bodies to the surgical profession helped — though never entirely solved — that problem.

Why dissection was feared

To a modern reader, dissection after execution might seem less terrible than the execution itself. To many people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was worse. A widespread religious belief held that physical resurrection of the body at the Last Judgement required the body to be buried intact in consecrated ground. Dissection destroyed the body and prevented Christian burial. For many convicted criminals — and their families — the prospect of being cut open on a surgeon’s table after death, with no burial and no grave, was a terror that went beyond death itself.

This was precisely the point. The Murder Act was designed to make the punishment of murder as frightening as possible, by adding to the certainty of death the additional horror of what would happen afterwards. The sentence of death and dissection was intended to be read aloud in open court immediately after conviction, including all its provisions, so that the condemned would be left in no doubt about their fate.

The Hobart gallows in practice

The gallows on Hunter Island served the colony from 1806. The location meant that executions were visible to the settlement’s population and, most significantly, to arriving convict ships. In the mid-1820s the gallows were relocated to the newly built convict barracks at the corner of Murray and Macquarie Streets, opposite St David’s cathedral.

The Murder Act applied in Van Diemen’s Land as in England, and its provisions were carried out here. The colonial surgeon was entitled to the bodies of executed murderers for dissection — a practice that served the limited medical education available in the colony. The executioner, by long-established custom, was entitled to keep and sell the clothing in which the condemned was executed.

Public executions in Tasmania ceased in January 1856, after which all executions were conducted within the walls of the gaol, out of public view. The last execution in Tasmania took place in 1946. Capital punishment was abolished in Tasmania in 1968.

The last gibbets

The last man gibbeted in England was William Jobling, on 21 August 1832 — just months after the Murder Act’s gibbeting provisions were repealed. In the British colonies, the last recorded gibbeting was that of convicted murderer John McKay in 1837. He was gibbeted on a tree beside the Midland Highway, just north of Perth, Tasmania — making Tasmania home to the last gibbet in the British colonial world.

Primary source: Murder Act 1752 (25 Geo. 2. c. 37) https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1751-25-geo2-c37-murder-act/

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On the morning of Wednesday 16 April 1834, a young man named Joseph Greenwood was hanged in Hobart Town. He went to the scaffold with his back not yet healed from the 100 lashes he had received less than a month before. The wounds, one newspaper reported, were still uncicatrised — still open — when he died.

          The case caused an extraordinary sensation, and not only because of its brutality. What disturbed contemporaries, and what makes it significant now, was the question that hung over the entire proceedings: was any of it legal?

The Race Course

          The story begins on 17 March 1834, at the New Town racecourse. Joseph Greenwood was there — a young man, aged 23, described as old in iniquity despite his youth, who had absconded from a chain gang to which he had been assigned for some earlier offence. Constable Thomas Terry spotted him in the crowd and told him he was under arrest.

          Greenwood’s response was unambiguous. He would not, he said, be taken by any constable in Hobart Town. When Terry pursued him and threatened to knock him down if he didn’t stop, Greenwood turned and told him: “If you come near me, I will rip your guts out.”

          Constable Terry rushed him anyway. Greenwood had an open knife in his hand. By the time the pursuit ended — Greenwood was eventually seized by a Mr Cleburne and other constables — Terry had four wounds: a four-inch incised wound to the upper lip, a very dangerous wound at the angle of the jaw, a wound to the head, and another to the left side over the ribs. He had lost so much blood he could no longer continue the chase.

Flogged First, Then Tried

          What happened next is where the case moves from violent incident to something more troubling. Greenwood was brought before a magistrate, who divided his offending into two parts: the absconding, which the magistrate dealt with summarily, and the assault on Terry, which would go to the Supreme Court.           For the absconding, Greenwood was sentenced to one hundred lashes. He received them on 20 March.

          Ten days later, on 1 April, he stood trial before Mr Justice Montagu, still bearing the wounds of his flogging. He was found guilty on three of four counts — intent to maim, intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and assault for the purpose of escaping arrest — and sentenced to death.

          He was hanged in Hobart on 16^th April – less than 4 weeks later.

          A correspondent – notably the Editor of the newspaper – writing to Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor in London, put the central objection plainly: Greenwood had been flogged for the absconding, and then sent to his death for the assault — but the two offences were inseparable, arising from the same event.

          The magistrate who ordered the flogging knew perfectly well that the assault trial would follow, and knew perfectly well what the outcome of that trial would be. As the Tasmanian newspaper reported it, the magistrate had said to Greenwood in terms: “You are to receive one hundred lashes for absconding, and then you will be tried for this capital offence, and you will be hanged.”

          The Colonist newspaper was among those who found this intolerable. The editors wrote that they did not consider Greenwood innocent, nor an object deserving of mercy — but that he ought not to have been punished twice for what was, in substance, a single course of conduct. “This man’s fate is an awful consideration,” they wrote. “It was either just or unjust; and as there then were considerable doubts as to which was the case, we could have wished that the last awful extremity of the law had been dispensed with. We do not feel comfortable upon this head.”

A Legal Tangle

          The assault trial itself produced a separate legal controversy. Constable Terry had known Greenwood was an absentee not from his own observation, but because he had been told by a servant girl that Greenwood’s name appeared in the Government Gazette as a runaway. Constable Thomas Terry could not read. The question of whether this constituted sufficient legal grounds for an arrest produced a sharp exchange between Justice Montagu and the Attorney General.

          The Attorney General argued that constables had very extensive powers of arrest — that a constable could apprehend any man he merely suspected of felony, without needing to confirm that suspicion. Justice Montagu pushed back hard, observing that such a doctrine would give constables almost unlimited powers and reduce the liberty of the subject to a nullity. The two men, Montagu noted pointedly, differed widely on the matter. He said he would seek the Chief Justice’s opinion on the point.

          That the jury convicted anyway, and that Greenwood hanged, suggests the legal question was not resolved in any way that helped him.

A Stain Upon the Annals of the Island

          Justice Montagu, to his credit, had remonstrated with the magistrate as soon as he learned of the flogging — but by then, as the Tasmanian observed, it was too late. The lash had done its work. The execution followed.

          The Tasmanian reached for a phrase that has not lost its force: “the last awful power of man over man.” The same paper described Greenwood going to his death with his lacerated back not yet healed, and raised the disturbing suggestion that his brief respite — a short delay between sentencing and execution — had been granted specifically so that his wounds might heal enough that he could mount the scaffold without visible agony.

          This, the paper immediately insisted, could not have been true. The alternative — that it was true — was apparently too much to contemplate in print.

          Greenwood himself remained hardened almost to the end. The Reverend Mr Bedford attended him, as he attended so many of the condemned in these years, and it was reportedly the influence of another prisoner named Buchan, recently arrived and himself repentant, that finally brought Greenwood to some state of resignation before he died.

          He was, the newspapers agreed, very young.

A note about the conduct record for Joseph Greenwood in the image above. In just five years, he received a total of 387 lashes. The last 100 lashes, in March 1834 for the final absconding, were administered while he was awaiting trial for an offence that everyone in the room knew would result in his death.

The VDL penal system did not correct Joseph Greenwood. It destroyed him, incrementally and methodically, and then hanged what was left.

Sources: Tasmanian (Hobart), 4 April 1834, p. 4; Colonial Times (Hobart), 8 April 1834, p. 6; Colonist and Van Diemen’s Land Commercial and Agricultural Advertiser, 8 April 1834, p. 2; Hobart Town Courier, 18 April 1834, p. 2; Colonist and Van Diemen’s Land Commercial and Agricultural Advertiser, 22 April 1834, p. 2. Via Trove, National Library of Australia.

Transcription of the conduct record

Transcription of the conduct record for Joseph Greenwood is as follows. Colonial administrative handwriting of this period is notoriously difficult to read, and this transcription, though carefully prepared, may contain errors of reading.

Arrived VDL Oct 1828

July 3 1829 Desertion of Duty, also making use of improper language to his Master — Reprimanded.

July 24 1829 Neglect of duty & disobedience of orders yesterday evening;  — 12 Lashes on the breech.

Nov 9 1829 Absconded from his Master’s service on Wed 4^th Nov, and absent for 3 days. 3 days on the treadmill, and returned to his master’s service.

Nov 20 1829 Insolence and being out after hours — Admonished.

March 6 1830 Assaulting William Lumsden 3rd Mate of the Ship Greenock at the wharf on Sunday last — Chain gang 6 months and recommended to be removed to the Deep Gulley.

January 25 1831 Giving rum to Mr Thomson’s servant Stark, and receiving from Stark potatoes out of Mr Thomson’s garden. 50 Lashes

Same date – Insolence and disobedience of orders 3 months Hard Labour in the Chain Gang at Bridgewater.

June 24 1831 Being found at the Turks Head Public House last night after hours & representing himself to be a free man — 25 Lashes

Sept 2 1831 Going on board the Druminore in the Harbour with intent to escape from the Colony. Imprisonment and Hard Labor for 3 years & recommended to be worked in the Hulk Chain Gang

July 25 1831 Working on the water without a pass while on the Sick List of the Prisoner Barracks on Saturday last — 25 Lashes

Dec 27 1831 Absconded from the Hulk Chain Gang on the 11th & remaining illegally at large until apprehended at Sandy Bay — to be removed to Macquarie Harbour 3 yrs at which Settlement his former sentence to imprisonment with  Hard Labor is to be enforced

Feb 21 1832 Absconding from the Hulk Chain Gang & remaining illegally at large until apprehended in a lone hut in the Bush — 100 Lashes in front of the Hulk Gang & recommended to be removed to Macquarie Harbour pursuant to sentence of Dec 27 1831.

Nov 22 1831 fighting in the presence of the Gang — 25 Lashes

Sept 19^th 1832 Insolence to the Sergeant Superintendent — 50 Lashes

March 18 1834 Absconding — 100 Lashes

Mar 18 1834 Absconding from chain gang, cutting and maiming Thomas Terry with intent to kill him. Committed for trial. Guilty

Apr 16 1834 Executed at Hobart

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“She Will Do Very Well Where She Is”: The Grim Case of Ellen Wilson and her lousy husband James, 1859

In February 1859, the Liverpool Street neighbours of a Hobart carpenter named James Wilson* began to notice a smell. Not the kind of smell you could ignore, or wave away, or attribute to something else. This was, as one witness would later testify in court, a smell that could be detected thirty yards from the house.

Inside, lying uncoffined on a sofa, was the body of Ellen Wilson — James Wilson’s wife.

Ellen had died on 13 February 1859, after a long illness with dropsy**. Her husband had been in the house when she died. He was also, by every account given at the subsequent hearing before the Hobart Police Court, comprehensively, continuously, and catastrophically drunk.

The first to raise the alarm was Mr J. Smales, a missionary who had been visiting Ellen during her illness and continued to call at the house after her death. He found James Wilson in no state to make arrangements of any kind. When Smales pressed him on the urgent need for burial — decomposition had set in almost immediately — Wilson’s response was a masterpiece of alcoholic indifference. “If she is not buried today, she will be tomorrow, and if not then, the day after, and if not then, she will do very well where she is.”

She was not buried the next day, nor the day after that.

Wilson’s employer, Mr Alexander Clarke of the firm Clarke and Davidson, had tried to help. Told that his carpenter’s wife had died, Clarke gave Wilson £1 toward the cost of a coffin and told him he could select timber from the yard, with another worker to assist him in making it. Wilson chose his boards. He never built the coffin.

The £1, Wilson later admitted to the City Inspector, had been spent. He had been “troubled,” he said. He was, witnesses confirmed, very drunk all the time.

It was not until 18 February — five days after Ellen’s death — that the Government intervened and had the body removed to the Hospital. James Wilson had been, in the magistrate Mr Tarleton’s measured phrase, “wallowing in a state of beastly drunkenness” throughout.

Tarleton committed the case to the Supreme Court, requiring Wilson to find bail of £100 with two sureties of £50 each — a considerable sum for a man who had just spent the £1 given to him for his wife’s coffin on booze.

At the Supreme Court, James Wilson was found guilty of wilfully neglecting to bury his wife. He was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment with hard labour.

Ellen Wilson, who had suffered through a long illness and died on a sofa in her own home, does not otherwise appear in the record.

Source: The Courier (Hobart), 16 March 1859, p. 3; via Trove, National Library of Australia.

*James Wilson bio:

Transported from Scotland to VDL in 1842 on the Emily, for ‘habitual theft’ with a sentence of 10 years. His conduct record shows a series of misdemeanours, but only enough to see him sentenced to hard labour or time in solitary. 11 Sept 1849 – ticket of leave, 7 July 1857 – Free certificate. No record has yet been found of his marriage to Ellen, nor any other record of her existence, death or burial.

**A note on dropsy

Dropsy — known today as oedema — was not a disease in itself but a symptom of underlying illness: an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the body’s tissues, causing painful and often dramatic swelling, most commonly of the legs, abdomen, and lungs. In the nineteenth century it was a commonly recorded cause of death, appearing on countless death certificates and in countless newspaper notices, because it was the visible end-stage of so many serious conditions — heart failure, kidney disease, liver failure, and severe malnutrition among them.

For a woman in colonial Hobart in 1859, a likely underlying causes could have been chronic heart or kidney disease, though advanced liver disease — itself sometimes a consequence of living with a heavily alcoholic partner in conditions of poverty and poor nutrition — cannot be ruled out. Whatever its origin, dropsy was a slow, uncomfortable, and undignified way to die, involving progressive swelling, breathlessness, and exhaustion over weeks or months. Ellen Wilson endured all of that, and then what came after.

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‘Hobart at War 1939–1945’ is a striking and thoughtful visual history of Tasmania’s capital during the Second World War. Compiled by Col Dennison, the book gathers hundreds of black-and-white photographs originally published in The Mercury newspaper throughout the wartime years. Each image is accompanied by a short, informative caption from Dennison, offering insight into the people, places, and moments captured — from civil defence drills and patriotic parades to ration queues and quiet resilience on the home front.

Presented as an oversized glossy paperback, the book is both a tribute and a time capsule. It brings to life the everyday experience of Hobartians during a time of global upheaval, revealing a community that responded to war with strength, cooperation, and endurance. Whether you’re a history enthusiast or a local resident, this collection provides a moving and accessible way to connect with Hobart’s past.

Available from Cracked and Spineless New and Used Books in Hobart, at just $15, Hobart at War is an affordable and rewarding addition to any Tasmanian history collection.

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In August, 1851, when the English Parliament passed the Australian Constitutions Act it confirmed legislative powers on VDL. A blended legislative council could now be established: part nominated, part elected.

16 electorates were declared, dividing the colony up on the basis of the number of houses in each district.

Hobart with 3,285 houses was made into a single district and allocated 2 members. Launceston had 1,642 houses and one member.

Keen to soothe the perpetual north-south tensions, Denison allocated 6 members to the north (4,328 houses) and 10 to the south (7,362 houses).

When it came to deciding just who could vote, the men in power decided to keep the power for themselves. They limited the right to enroll to vote and stand for election by income, property and gender.

The criteria for enrolment:

1. Freehold ownership of a property worth £100 or more
2. Male British subjects
3. Over 21 years

This limited the franchise to no more than 30% of the population.

Plural voting was allowed for those who owned multiple properties each worth £100 or more. Voting in person occurred on a single day and polling booths were open only from 9-4pm.

On voting day, 21 October, 1851 there was great excitement at the polling booths in both Hobart and Launceston, where multiple contenders stood for election.

The Launceston franchise extended to just on 800 voters, and Hobart to 2,500. In both electorates, the Anti-transportationists won all the seats and drunken rowdies celebrated the wins, with several people injured in Hobart.

Things were quieter in the country districts, where the number of eligible voters was smaller, and four members were elected unopposed.

Here is the list of those elected, with the electorate they represented:

None of these men belonged to any political party, nor were they involved in factions which agree to vote together on particular issues. As a whole, however, the governor saw them all as the opposition because he could not command their vote.

Governor Dennison then announced the appointment of his 8 non-elected members of the Executive Council to the blended Legislative Council.

The first meeting of the new Legislative Council on 30 Dec 1851 was held in the Long Room, where the old Council had meet. It was on the first floor of what was at the time the Custom House. Now known as Parliament House, this prominent, elegant Georgian era sandstone building on Hobart’s waterfront was built by convicts to a design by colonial architect John Lee Archer.

There were significant changes to the way the new council operated. It sat for more days each year, the amount of business to be considered increased and the members were more in control of their own proceedings – especially as the governor was now excluded from parliamentary deliberations.

While the majority of the Bills came from the Executive Council presided over by the governor, the Executive did not always have its own way, and often its Bills were defeated.

This was VDL’s first partially representative government. It is clear from this analysis of the first 4 years that the blended Council was hard working, and determined not to be controlled by the wishes of the governor. The elected members, while not a faction, did operate like an effective opposition to the government, holding it to account and scrutinising its plans and motives.

One of the most important tasks undertaken by the Legislative Council was the drafting of the new Constitution for the colony, begun in 1853. Half way through they decided that what the colony really needed was a bicameral parliament – two houses, not just one. This

While this was being considered, in 1854, the membership of the Legislative Council was increased to 33 (11 nominated, 22 elected).

There was widespread popular support for further changes to be made in Van Diemen’s Land – and that was in the change of name. Many institutions had been referring to the island as Tasmania for many years and it just required the legal adoption of the new name for it to become official., which occurred in November 1855.

At this time, the population of Tasmania was declining, from 68,000 in 1847 to 61,800 in 1855. This mass departure of skilled trademen, farmers and general labourers was due to the better options available on the mainland goldfields. in this time there was a significant reduction in depredations by bushrangers thanks to the work done in regional areas by settlers and police. The last really violent, notorious bushranger in the colony was Rocky Whelan, who was executed in June 1855.

Governor Dennison left VDL in January 1855 to become governor of NSW. He was replaced by Henry Fox-Young, whose job it was to oversee the government of Tasmania.

In May, 1855 Royal Assent from Queen Victoria granting permission for a bicameral parliament was received, followed by permission to change the name to Tasmania.

The formal name change was declared on 1st January 1856 and elections for the new House of Assembly were held in October year.

So now shiny new Tasmania had a shiny new bicameral parliament with a shiny new Legislative Council Chamber. This was specially constructed for the purpose in the Custom House and apart from the electric lighting, little has changed since.

The House of Assembly sat in the Long Room, where they had to decide on the people who would fill the various roles, in particular who would be the first Premier of Tasmania?

Find out who, how and more in Part 7 – coming soon.

The post Part 6. But who got to vote? appeared first on Hobart History.

In 1828 the British government realised that the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) needed more than just one governor and a few officials to run the show, so the Imperial Act (9 Geo. IV, c. 83) allowed for the Legislative Council to be increased to 15 members.

It came into effect in VDL in 1830. The members of the council were:

All laws in force in England applied to the people living in VDL. Any new laws passed in VDL could not be counter to any English law. Laws were passed by majority vote and the VDL Governor could limit or modify any new VDL law by virtue of being the local representative of the Monarch.

This all worked well for the next 20 years for a small portion of the population: wealthy, free-settler white men of property and power. For rest of the population there was increasing discontent with the cost of the convict system to the colonists.

In 1845 Governor Eardley-Wilmot (1783 – 1847) was stuck and didn’t have anywhere to move. When he took over from Franklin in 1843, the colonial treasury was desperately short of funds. The British government continued to send an increasing number of convicts to VDL, having ended transportation to NSW, VIC, and QLD by 1840.

VDL was saturated in unemployed free and unemployable non-free people. Eardley-Wilmot had tried to raise funds by setting a minimum of £1 per acre for Crown land sales as well as raising the taxes on imported goods such as sugar and tea from 5% to 15%. There was so much loud and angry opposition from the colonists that the new taxes were withdrawn.

This is what the Legislative Council looked like in 1845:

Dry, Fenton, Gregson, Kermode, Kerr and Swanston complained about the continuation of the convict system in VDL. They also objected to the increased colonial expenditure on police and gaols in order to manage the convicts. They became known as the Patriotic Six – patriots for the best interests of VDL against the might of the British government. They reasoned that as the British government wanted to keep sending convicts to VDL then the British government should pay for the entire cost.

Eardley-Wilmot then tried to save money by reducing the salaries of all VDL officials. Chief Justice Pedder stated the the Legislative Council did not have the power to reduce his salary, nor that of anyone else appointed by the Crown. Eardley-Wilmot then suggested a heavy fee to license tradesmen and other skilled professions. This lead to even greater public indignation, with the familiar cry of ‘No taxation without representation’ being reported in the press, so that idea was scrapped as well.

Back in London, the colonial office headed by Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, still insisted that VDL was a penal colony and that convict labour should be able to pay its own way. He wouldn’t listen to anything to the contrary, and said that anyone emigrating to a penal settlement had surrendered the privileges they might have had if they had moved to any non-penal city in the British Empire.

In both London and Hobart Eardley-Wilmot was blamed for the shortcomings of a system which he had no power to change. Increasingly, he instructed the Legislative Council office bearers to vote with him and he used his casting vote as President of the Legislative Council to pass his budgets when the other non-official appointed members opposed him. This way Eardley-Wilmot blocked efforts for formal inquiries into the convict system and his management.

On 31 October, 1845 Eardley-Wilmot accused the opposing six of a deliberate attempt to embarrass the government and they in turn resigned their positions on the Legislative Council. As one, they walked out, leaving it without a quorum.

There was now enormous public feeling against the governor and the actions of the Patriotic Six were applauded by the free-setter population. Gregson, who lived near Richmond, was even presented by the locals with a gift of £2,000 and a commemorative silver plate in recognition of his public and patriotic stand.

The Six sent a letter to Lord Stanley explaining the situation and how they had been asked to pass a budget of expenses which the colony could not afford.

Eardley-Wilmot appointed replacements to the Legislative Council, but things didn’t improve when they too voted against him, so he still couldn’t pass any budgets or bills. With so much public feeling against him, in 1846 the British government sacked Eardley-Wilmot, hinting at rumours against his moral character. There wasn’t any truth to the rumours, nor was there any time for Eardley-Wilmot to reply and demand the names of those who accused him: he was dead within 4 months.

On his arrival in Hobart, the next governor, William Denison (1804 – 1871) was immediately inundated with letters and petitions calling for the abolition of transportation. The anti-government newspapers, Hobart Town Courier and Launceston Examiner, filled their editorials with lurid details of the horrors of transportation. The Anti-Transportation League, formed in VDL in 1844, was powering things along finding, vocal supporters in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Canterbury, NZ.

Governor Denison sent a survey to all VDL magistrates and men of large property and business holdings, asking 3 questions:

1. Do you think transportation should end?
2. If you think convicts should still be transported, how many each year?
3. What changes should be made to the system of hiring convict labour?

The anti-transportationists had the loudest voices, being the majority of the free, male population. They rapidly organised public meetings across the island. The meetings formed committees, wrote reports and all sent resounding STOP TRANSPORTATION demands to the governor.

Denison disagreed with the anti-transportationists, and pointed out the benefits of cheap, forced labour to the public works program of roads, bridges and government buildings. He quickly came to be seen by the colonists as part of the problem, especially after his report, containing a very derogatory assessment of VDL society was sent to Earl Grey, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies, and was then made public.

Finally the British government decided that VDL should be allowed to have a partially elected Legislative Council. The English parliament passed the Australian Constitutions Act in 1850 where the VDL Governor and Legislative Council could establish electoral districts, choose the number of members for Legislative Councils and make laws. The first elections in VDL were held on 21 Oct 1851.

16 seats were up for election. Eligibility to stand for election was as restricted as eligibility to vote. It was a very limited franchise, calculated to include only free-settler men of property, established business or high military rank or profession. All 16 seats were won by members of the Anti-Transportation League.

Guess what happened next.

At their first meeting in December, 1851, the Legislative Council voted 16 to 4 to request Queen Victoria to order the end of transportation.

It worked, but the end of transportation was a gradual affair and the last ship, the St Vincent with male convicts, arrived in 1853.

The elected members of the 1851 Legislative Council were not party political members. Political parties as we have them today did not come into existence until after the 1880s.

More will be written about party politics in due course, but before that we have to change our name, take on another house of parliament and find a premier.

That will all happen in Part 6, coming soon.

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In January 1837, Sir John Franklin (1786 – 1847), arctic hero and explorer, succeeded George Arthur (1784 – 1854, Australia’s longest serving colonial governor) as governor of Van Diemen’s Land.

Many of the free settlers hoped that the autocratic regime they had tolerated under Arthur would become more liberal under Franklin. The island was still a vast penal colony with a population of nearly 43,000, of whom 17,500 were convicts under sentence. Most of the convicts were privately assigned for work in construction, farming, fencing or domestic service. Those under hard labour were sent to public service on road gangs or logging.

Not every free settler was granted the assignment of convict labour, but those who were acknowledged that the forced labour of the convicts made a significant contribution to their personal wealth and the increasing prosperity of the colony. For those colonists, the convict system under Governor Arthur was largely considered a success, and they felt his autocratic, invasive method of governing maintained the safety of all free people on the island.

Many other settlers, however, resented Arthur’s interfering in the developments of the colony’s pastoral, agricultural and industrial enterprises, and so were not as readily granted convict labour, reducing their capacity to share equally in the prosperity of the colony. This body called for the power to elect members of the Legislative Council, to create a representative government.

They also called for the end of transportation.

Arriving in 1836, John Franklin, unlike Arthur, was not accustomed to administration of a penal settlement, nor any civil office and so was heavily controlled and guided by the Arthur faction that remained. These were Arthur’s appointed public servants who continued to run the colony – the key figure was John Montagu. He arrived in Hobart on the same ship as Arthur in 1824 with his wife – who was Arthur’s niece. Montagu wielded power early on, being appointed private secretary to Arthur (1824), Colonial Secretary (1825, 1834 – 1841), Clerk of the Executive & Legislative Councils (1826) , and Treasurer (1832).

Franklin’s troubles really came to a head with the introduction of the convict probation system in 1839 for male convicts and 1843 for female convicts. The plan was that instead of being assigned to private settler or public service work on arrival in VDL, the convict would serve a term of probation in a government institution. The duration of the probation depended on the length of the original sentence. During this incarceration period the convict would receive compulsory moral and religious instruction, as well as being taught to read and write.

The women would be taught domestic skills, the men farming and labouring skills. There were more than 80 probation stations around VDL, including on Maria Island. In Hobart the women were kept in the Female Factory at South Hobart. The Campbell St barracks just at the edge of the CBD was for male convicts and intended only as a staging point before they were sent out of the city to remote probation stations, farms or road gangs.

At the end of the probation period, the theory was that the convict was now reformed and would be suitable to work for wages as a pass holder in a settler’s farm, home or business. After a period of good behaviour, then a ticket of leave could be granted, then a conditional pardon.

It was experimental and was modified many times until it was abandoned with the eventual abolition of transportation in 1853.

The probation system was perceived as better than assignment, as it had a focus on moral reform – because it was assumed that all convicts were of low moral character and just needed a good example to set them straight. The assignment system had been a punitive system that the administration relied on for economic productivity. This sounded too much like slavery, which was a hotly debated topic in England at the time.

The probation system was seen to be taking the moral high ground, as a more civilised way to treat criminals.

What it did was to cause the political and economic climate in VDL to take a distinctly different turn.

The probation system deprived the colonists of cheap labour and delivered large groups of idle, unemployable convicts to undeveloped regions of the island. Plus there was the public agitation of the Anti-Transportation League, formed in VDL in 1844.

The probation system turned out to be a disastrous failure – poor administration and planning, underfunded, overwhelming numbers of new arrivals topped off with an economic depression. No one wanted to employ the passholder convicts so the state was still responsible for their food, clothing and accommodation.

Added to this was the pressure from London for the colony to bear an increasing amount of the cost of the probation system, including the costs of transportation.

John Franklin’s successor, John Eardley-Wilmot (1783 – 1847) oversaw the end of the probation system which was also the end of his political career .

The majority of colonists had turned into vocal and active opponents of transportation and felt they didn’t have enough say in the way the colony was being managed.

The final straw was the mass walk-out of half of Wilmot’s Legislative Council, those who became known as the Patriotic Six. They were six of the eight civilian, appointed members of the Legislative Council. The names of the rebels are Richard Dry, Michael Fenton, Thomas Gregson, William Kermode, John Kerr and Charles Swanston.

When they resigned their positions on the Legislative Council it left Eardley-Wilmot unable to pass any new laws or approve a new budget.

Read on – in Part 5 you will find all the details about how their walkout lead to the first elections in VDL.

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With the reading of the Royal Charter of Justice in Hobart on 7th May, 1824 the next step was for Governor George Arthur to select the men who would make up the first Legislative Council or Crown Council of Van Diemen’s Land.

The first group were John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice; William Hamilton, Colonial Secretary; Adolarius Humphrey; Edward Curr; Edward Abbott. They had their first meeting on 25 August 1824 and the first thing on the agenda was the hot topic of separation from NSW.

The separation of VDL from NSW was prompted by the loud and vigorous agitation of a group of colonists who felt they weren’t being heard by Governor Arthur, so they sent a petition to the King.

The hundred petitioners described themselves as ‘landholders, merchants and other free inhabitants’ of Van Diemen’s Land. They forwarded the petition to Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies, through Colonel William Sorell, the former Lieutenant-Governor of VDL who was in London after he was replaced in office by Lieutenant-Colonel George Arthur.

The petitioners pleaded the case of the increasing amount of emigrants being directed from England to VDL who would want to have more direct control of their capital that they brought with them. They also pointed out the great developments in agriculture and pastural holdings of VDL that needed more workers to develop further, and the promise of trade and commerce with Britain that could only happen if VDL was free from the chains of NSW.

While Governor Arthur was keen on full administrative independence from NSW, his vision for the colony of VDL was one of a vast prison colony, not of a free settlement, more of a ‘gaol-in-chief to the Empire’. He didn’t think the colony could develop beyond being a penal settlement.

Imperial plans for the Colony fell somewhere between the two.

The Colony was granted its first legislature, to comprise between five and seven members to be appointed by the Governor. The powers of the Legislative Council of VDL were the same as those of the NSW Legislative Council.

14 July, 1825, VDL separated from NSW but of course, things are never that quick and easy. It took a lengthy process of formalities, declarations and proclamations. Here is a timeline to make it easy on you:

24 Nov 1825 Governor Darling (NSW Governor) arrives in Hobart
3 Dec 1825     Darling proclaims VDL as a separate colony from NSW
17 Dec 1825 Governor Arthur publishes proclamation
12 Apr 1826   Legislative Council meets formally
26 Apr 1826   Legislative Council swears in members
21 Jun 1826    Legislative Council meets for first proper session.

1824 – 1851 All members of the Legislative Council were appointed by the Governor

1851 to 1856 two thirds of the Members were elected and one third appointed

From December 1856 all Members of the Legislative Council and House of Assembly were elected.

Part 4.

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