A fourth clergyman, Philip Conolly—the Catholic chaplain from 1821—held no such office and was barred from it. This key difference sharpens the argument: the Anglicans’ civil careers explain why convicts mostly received religious formalities, while the condemned sometimes received deeper attention. Knopwood’s case shows this pattern in detail.

Knopwood: glebe, bench, and garden

Knopwood arrived on HMS Resolution in 1803 and took the first service held in Van Diemen’s Land, at Hobart, in February 1804. Within weeks he was also a magistrate, a position he held continuously until 1828. Twenty-four years on the bench, five years longer than he held the chaplaincy itself. He was, by his own government’s account, a man worth endowing: a 400-acre glebe[1] at Clarence Plains (Rokeby), another 100 acres at the same location, 30 acres at Hobart that became his celebrated “Cottage Green,” a further 500-acre grant from Macquarie in 1815, and land on the South Esk River. That is well over a thousand acres of granted land sitting under one clergyman, on top of a stipend that rose from £182 to £260 in 1817.

None of this made him rich. He was chronically in debt and eventually lost Cottage Green in a questionable transaction at the hands of Governor Arthur. Knopwood retired on a reduced pension. The debt is the point: maintaining land, hosting guests, and running a prominent garden took time away from convict ministry. He was a landed gentleman with competing obligations, including the magistrate’s bench. He was remembered for both kindness and severity, reflecting the demands of his dual roles—an ambivalence visible in his diary.

His diary reflects these priorities: detailed entries about farming (such as sowing wheat or landing the colony’s first crayfish) and magistracy (sentencing convicts to harsh punishments), but only a single brief mention of a muster service for convicts. The flogging, not the sermon, received more attention.

Bedford: schools, council, and a reputation in tatters

Bedford, Knopwood’s successor from 1823, followed a similar pattern, holding roles as superintendent of schools, committee member, Legislative Council chaplain, and justice of the peace. He also conducted weekly services at church, gaol, and barracks—often single-handedly. For long periods, the colony’s chaplaincy for convicts was the additional duty of just one man, fitted around other obligations.

Bedford’s standing collapsed: accused of falsifying school returns in 1836 and suffering financial embarrassment, he was not positioned to make convict reform his central concern. Chaplaincy was one duty among many, discharged as time and character allowed—leaving limited space for pastoral care.

Yet Governor Arthur praised Bedford’s sincerity and devotion to condemned men—a distinction only meaningful if such attention was rare. His notable pastoral care was selective, not routine, illustrating how the office shaped where time could be spent.

Youl: glebe, stock, and sons

Youl’s case is the plainest: his chaplaincy was defined by land, livestock, and family advancement, not civil office. He received a 400-acre glebe with convict servants, a further 700-acre personal grant, and government stock. He used these resources to establish his sons as pastoralists, focusing on family advancement over missionary work.

Youl never sat on the magistrate’s bench; his chaplaincy obligations were secondary to building his family’s status among the colonial gentry. Assigned convict labour worked his land for family gain, not for convict reformation. This makes the transition from ministry to family advancement clear.

The Chaplaincy: an establishment, not a vocation

None of this implies hypocrisy or villainy on the part of Knopwood, Bedford, or Youl. Rather, it reveals how the established Church of England made its clergy Crown appointees, granting them land, salaries, and administrative positions. Chaplains who were also magistrates had no institutional reason to challenge the convict system—they were its officers. Convict moral improvement, though real in official rhetoric and muster rolls, was a sideline compared with their offices and property.

Where the attention actually went

Where attention of the chaplains did concentrate was the condemned cell, and for reasons that had little to do with either Anglican’s ordinary pastoral instincts. Knopwood’s own record supplies the clearest case. When Alexander Pearce, an ordinary convict at large after his first escape from Macquarie Harbour, confessed to Knopwood — acting in his capacity as magistrate — that he had killed and eaten his fellow escapees, Knopwood did not believe him, and sent him back to Macquarie Harbour. It was only after Pearce’s second escape, once he was under sentence of death, that a clergyman took his account seriously enough to act on it: Father Philip Conolly, the colony’s Catholic chaplain since 1821, heard his full confession the night before his execution in 1824 and gave him the last rites. The man whose office was closest to Pearce for most of his convict life treated his confession as incredible; the priest who attended him at the very end treated it as the truth, and it was.

Conolly stands apart from Knopwood and Bedford, as he held no magistracy, glebe, or council seat—Macquarie’s government restricted Catholic clergy’s activity and excluded them from the land-and-office system. Covering the whole colony alone, his routine convict ministry was sparse, but preparing condemned men for death was central to his role, not an exception forced by other duties. What pastoral attention he gave was shaped by institutional limits, not by rivalry or personal virtue.

Nearly twenty years later, Bedford’s chaplaincy revealed the same divide: in 1842, two condemned convicts switched to Catholicism, prompting official debate. Bedford objected, suspecting a desire for confessional privacy. This episode shows the Anglican chaplain acting as an office-holder defending territory, not just as a pastor.

Executions were public events the state needed to stage as ‘good deaths’ with visible pastoral care—hence the spike in clerical attention, regardless of denomination. For Bedford, such engagement was remarkable amid civil duties; for Conolly, it was central, since civil office was never an option. The key variable was office, not theology.

Sources

• Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Knopwood, Robert (Bobby) (1763–1838)’ — grants, magistracy, salary, pension, reputation.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Bedford, William (1781–1852)’ — civil appointments, the 1836 schools affair, Boyes’s assessment, Arthur’s praise for his attention to condemned men.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Youl, John (1773–1827)’ — his arrival at Port Dalrymple, his salary, his glebe and assigned servants, his South Esk grant, and the Macarthur rams.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Conolly, Philip (1786–1839)’ — his arrival in 1821, and Macquarie’s restrictions on Catholic clergy.
• Companion to Tasmanian History, ‘Conolly, Philip’ — his lack of civil office, his quarterly circuit, and his preparation of condemned men as “perhaps his hardest role.”
• In Bobby’s Footsteps (Battery Point History Walk), ‘Cottage Green’ — the loss of Knopwood’s Hobart property.
• Robert Knopwood, diary, 1805–1808 (transcript), University of Tasmania ePrints, PDF — the farming and sentencing entries, and the 12 April 1805 muster service.
• ‘Alexander Pearce’, Wikipedia — the sequence of Pearce’s confessions and his execution.
• Hobart History, ‘A Convenient Conversion: Two Condemned Men and the Question of Faith at the Gallows, 1842’ — the Langham and Shaw case.

[1] A glebe is land granted to support a parish clergyman, with the produce or rent from it (rather than a separate salary alone) meant to provide part of his living — traditionally attached to the office itself rather than owned by the man personally. Hence, it passed to whoever held the parish next, not to his heirs. In Knopwood’s case, the 400-acre grant at Clarence Plains was described specifically as glebe land at Rokeby, distinct from the further grants he received in his own right (the 100 acres at the same location, the Hobart allotment that became Cottage Green, the 500 acres from Macquarie in 1815, and the South Esk land). Part of his thousand-odd acres came with the chaplaincy as an endowment of the office, and the rest was his personally, as a settler in his own name.

The post Pastors or Public Servants? The Dual Roles of Chaplains in Van Diemen’s Land appeared first on Hobart History.

Mary Ann Clements left no letters, no portrait, and no descendants who wrote her into family legend. What she left is a paper trail: a surgeon’s journal, a description list, a conduct record, a scatter of Lower Court entries, a handful of newspaper lines, a marriage register, a death certificate, and records of her time in a dark cell at a Female Factory. Together, these records show the cost of punishment in the dark cell, and they make her case central because they reveal that cost.¹

The dark cell

Within a year of arriving in Hobart, Mary Ann Clements was shut into one of the solitary punishment cells. Her conduct record shows her cycling repeatedly through punishment yards and solitary cells across 1842 and into 1843, in addition to a three-month sentence to the Crime Class. The pattern of repeated confinements from 6 to 30 days, sometimes on bread and water, sometimes with work – shows how the Convict System disciplined women in this period. That record is the starting point for her case, because it shows the punishment she endured.

What did that confinement actually mean?

The Female Convicts Research Centre’s own account of the punishment gives some sense of it. Cells at Female Factories came in two forms: light cells, where a woman might do needlework or pick oakum (old ship’s rope), and dark cells, admitting no light at all, usually on bread and water.²

An 1838 coroner’s inspection described the cells at the Cascades Female Factory as ‘most frightful dungeons,’ in which women could scarcely stand upright, ventilated only during the daily cleaning; one witness said the stench from a cell ‘was so great, as to make the gentlemen immediately near it, retreat into the open air.’ A convict named Barbara Henning had died in one; the inquest verdict attributed her death to ‘diarrhoea and fever, produced by being confined in a crowded unwholesome place, without necessary air and exercise.’³ This is the cost the dark cell imposed.

This was the system Mary Ann Clements passed through more than once in her first two years in the colony. She was a young Manchester housemaid who had arrived in Hobart only months before. Her case shows what this system did to one woman, and why the punishment record matters: it reveals the cost of the dark cell. Who was she, and what put her there?

A housemaid in trouble

The clearest picture of how she came to be sentenced to the cells comes from the Hobart and Launceston Lower Court record books. On Friday 28 January 1842, Clements — by then assigned to a Mr Thomas Davies — was brought before G. S. Davies, Assistant Police Magistrate, at George Town, on two charges arising from the same night. Constable William Brown testified that her master had come to the lock-up around ten o’clock the previous evening to report his assigned servant missing, suspecting she was at the house of a ticket-of-leave man named William Allen. Brown went to the house, found the door open, and inside found Clements, Allen, another ticket-of-leave man named Courtney, and a free man.

Allen’s defence, as Brown recorded it, was that Clements ‘came to his house, rushed in and he could not get her out again,’ and that he had been ‘afraid to get a Constable for fear of being put in the Watch House himself.’ Clements pleaded guilty to being out after hours and found in Allen’s house, and was sentenced to three months’ confinement in the Female House of Correction’s Crime Class. A second, lesser charge from the same morning — being found in Allen’s house between six and seven o’clock — earned her a severe reprimand.⁴

It is a small, human scene: a nervous man refusing to eject an unwanted guest for fear of the law, a constable breaking in on a crowded room, a young woman’s night out becoming a matter of state record. It also marks Clements’s entry into the punishment apparatus of the Female Factory described above, where her case begins to show the system’s cost in concrete terms.

A Manchester girl in Hobart Town

In October 1841, Mary Ann Clements had walked down the gangway of the convict transport Garland Grove into Hobart Town. She was twenty years old, four feet eleven and a half inches tall, with brown hair, hazel eyes and a fresh complexion. She had worked in Manchester as a housemaid and nursery girl. The clerk who processed her on arrival recorded a small constellation of tattoos on her arms, with initials and a heart above the elbow:  the ordinary markings of a young working woman’s affections, now filed away as identifying marks on a government description list. She had been sentenced to ten years’ transportation for stealing 3 half Crowns.⁵

A body already tested.

Clements’s health had been severely tried even before she reached the colony. The surgeon superintendent’s journal from the Garland Grove records that in July 1841, some three months into the voyage, she began showing ‘dysenteric symptoms’ — dry skin, a furred tongue, thirst — that had troubled her for two days already. He dosed her that night with a mercury pill and started her on a low dose of ipecac, the standard nineteenth-century remedy for dysentery. Two days later, with griping pains and blood-tinged discharges, she was moved into the ship’s hospital.⁶

What followed was a serious illness. Over the next week her condition worsened — daily purging, a hot, dry skin, an ‘urgent’ thirst, a tongue ‘furred, and glazed with red edges’ — and by 13 July the surgeon was recording it as ‘a decided case of Enteritic,’ inflammation of the bowel rather than simple dysentery. He kept her on mercury, watching carefully for the tell-tale signs of the treatment itself turning dangerous; by the 15th he was noting ‘mercurial foetor of the breath,’ a sign the dose had reached the edge of what the body could tolerate. She began to improve in the days that followed — sleeping better, her urine ‘passed freely,’ her tongue softening — and was put onto a recovery regimen of arrowroot, a quassia tonic to restore her appetite, prepared soup, and three glasses of port wine a day, the standard supports given to a convalescent patient. The surgeon’s note for 20 July records her as ‘very much reduced but otherwise doing well.’ She was not discharged from the ship’s hospital as cured until 12 August — five weeks after she first fell ill, and less than two months before the Garland Grove dropped anchor in Hobart.

It is a detail easy to overlook, buried in Latin abbreviations in a shipboard ledger, but it matters. The surgeon’s entries show Mary Ann Clements arrived in Van Diemen’s Land as a twenty-year-old who had already survived one serious brush with death, and a gruelling course of dosing medicines to match, before she had set foot in the colony at all. That history helps explain the woman who later entered the punishment system. This medical record adds another part of her case before the punishment record begins.

“No”: the administration’s own account

What makes Clements’s case more than a single sad story is that the men who ran the solitary confinement system also explained, in their own words, why they thought it worked. Their account lets her experience test the system’s claims, and sharpens the contrast between punishment as described and punishment as lived: it makes the cost visible and central.

In December 1841 — weeks before Clements’s first appearance in court — a Board of Inquiry sat in Hobart to examine the discipline of the Female House of Correction. Its members questioned the Factory’s superintendent, Mr Hutchinson, at length. Asked whether the women dreaded solitary confinement on bread and water, he agreed it was ‘invariably a dread.’ Still, he added, tellingly, that ‘I observe that the same parties return again and again to them’ — an admission, in effect, that the punishment was not actually deterring anyone. Asked what immediate effect it produced, he answered ‘good resolutions.’ Asked whether the cells’ effect lasted longer than the Crime Class yard’s, he said he thought it did. And then, under direct questioning:

‘Do you ever observe any bad effect to be produced by the confinement in point of health or intellect?’ — ‘No.’⁷

The Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Josiah Spode, went further still. Examined by the same Board a few days later, he declared himself ‘most strongly impressed with the opinion that to render the House of Correction effective all punishments… should be undergone in separate confinement,’ and argued that under a fully separate system, ‘the length of the sentences passed on women assigned service might be diminished, the mode of punishment being so much more effective.’ He framed isolation explicitly as reformative — ‘a means of reformation, to fit them again for their duties’ — the same logic that had led penal reformers, from the 1770s onward, to promote solitude as a humane alternative to flogging.⁸

So, by the administration’s own account, in the very months Mary Ann Clements was first being sentenced to the cells: no harm to health, good resolutions produced, and a punishment effective enough that a colonial official was recommending more of it. Her record then asks us to compare that claim with what came next. Her case is worth testing because it reveals the cost they denied.

What the record actually shows

Nearly two hundred years later, a very different kind of record can be brought to bear on Hutchinson’s ‘No’ and tested against the evidence that follows. Clements’s case now stands as a way to test that answer against the longer evidence of what dark-cell punishment cost women, keeping that cost central.

Using the analysis of data from the digitised conduct records for the 13,415 female convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land between 1803 and 1853 — nearly half of whom can now be linked to a recorded date and cause of death — historians Kris Inwood and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart reconstructed, for the first time, the relationship between time spent in the Factory’s cells and how long these women actually lived.⁹

Their finding, controlling for birthplace, literacy, age and decade of arrival, prior convictions and a record of sex work: every day spent in a dark cell reduced a convict woman’s life expectancy by ten days. Time in ‘separate treatment’ — the lighter, work-permitted form of isolation — cost roughly one day of life expectancy per day served, a much smaller and statistically insignificant effect. The baseline in their model, an illiterate convict woman tried in Britain who arrived in her twenties in the 1840s, had an estimated age at death of 57.7 years. Confinement in a dark cell pulled that figure down further still — on average, around a third of a year of life lost per sentence.

The excess deaths associated with dark-cell exposure clustered around mental and behavioural disorders, paralysis, accidents, and diseases of the nervous system — a signature of chronic harm consistent with what modern clinical literature on prolonged isolation would predict, even though, curiously, the study found no statistically elevated suicide risk (only one convict’s death, in 1853, was formally recorded as such). The same punishment record was also linked to a measurable reduction in the likelihood of a woman going on to have children in the colony — sensory deprivation, the authors argue, functioned as an unintended but real form of state-imposed birth control, quite apart from any of its stated purposes.¹⁰

Set Hutchinson’s flat ‘No’ against that ten-days-for-one ratio, and the distance between what the colonial administration believed it was doing and what it was actually doing becomes very difficult to ignore.

After the Factory

Mary Ann Clements’s own record did not end at George Town. Over the following three years she continued to appear before the Launceston courts on the familiar charges of colonial life under sentence: found in a disorderly house in February 1845 (one month’s hard labour), again in May (seven days’ hard labour), again in August (this time only admonished), and drunk in a public street in September, for which she was fined five shillings.¹¹ The Cornwall Chronicle‘s police columns caught her twice in these years, once with a touch of unexpected humour. In August 1848, the paper reported that Clements, by then holding her ticket of leave, and Mary Hardcastle brought before the magistrate ‘for taking too much of Burns’s ‘good Willie Waugh’. They paid paid a fine of ten shillings for their admiration of the ‘Bard of Ayre’s poetry.’’¹²

Then, in 1846, the pattern breaks. Mary Ann Clements married, becoming Mary Ann Powell, and — so far as the surviving newspaper and court record show — the offences stop. The volunteer researchers at the Female Convicts Research Centre, working through later Launceston court appearances under the name ‘Mary Ann Powell’ in the 1850s, concluded these most likely belonged to a different woman of the same name; the Mary Ann Powell who had been Mary Ann Clements appears, after her marriage, to have settled.¹³

She died on 5 July 1862, in Launceston, of consumption. Her death certificate recorded her simply as a ‘tin man’s wife.’ She was forty-one years old.¹⁴

A life, and a statistic

It is impossible to prove, from the documents that survive, that Mary Ann Clements’s death from tuberculosis in 1862 was caused by her time in the dark cells of the Female Factory twenty years earlier. Tuberculosis was endemic across the convict system — carried on transport ships, spread through crowded dormitories housing thirty or forty women at a time, the kind of congregate ward Hutchinson himself complained was where women were ‘corrupted’ and ‘contaminated’ by one another’s company. Any full account of how Clements came to be infected has to reckon with those overcrowded wards as much as with her stretches in solitary.

But it is not unreasonable to let the cells sit in that story rather than beside it. Nineteenth-century medicine itself held that damp, cold and confinement were ‘predisposing causes’ that primed the body for disease, even when some other cause delivered the final blow. A person who has spent repeated stretches on bread and water in an unlit, unventilated cell, at nineteen or twenty years old, has a body with less to spare for fighting off infection, then or years later. Modern medicine agrees that malnutrition, cold and prolonged psychological stress are recognised triggers for the reactivation of latent tuberculosis, sometimes decades after the initial exposure.

A woman who had already, at twenty, survived one serious brush with death aboard the Garland Grove — and who then spent her first years in the colony cycling through the Female Factory’s punishment cells — was not, in that sense, unmarked by what had happened to her. She had outlived it long enough for the connection to become invisible.

Forty-one is too young to die of anything. It was too young in 1862, and Inwood and Maxwell-Stewart’s research suggests it was not an accident of fate but, in part, of policy — a policy defended at the time by men who, when asked directly whether the punishment did any harm, answered ‘No.’ Mary Ann Clements’s death certificate does not mention her time in a Female Factory. But her conduct record does, and so, in the end, does she.

1. TAHO CON40-1-2 ︎
2. Female Convicts Research Centre, ‘Solitary Confinement’, femaleconvicts.org.au ︎
3. Colonial Times Hobart, 3 April 1838 ︎
4. TAHO LC156-1-1, George Town Lower Court Records, DI 398, 28 January 1842, before G. S. Davies Esq., transcription Female Convicts Research Centre database, femaleconvicts.org.au ︎
5. TAHO CON19-1-3 ︎
6. Surgeon Superintendent’s Journal, Garland Grove, 1841, ADM 101, The National Archives, UK, entries 8 July – 12 August 1841. ︎
7. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline, Van Diemen’s Land, 1841, Correspondence, Legal Branch, CSO 22/1/50, Archives Office of Tasmania, examination of Mr Hutchinson, 8 and 11 December 1841. ︎
8. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline, 1841, examination of Josiah Spode, Principal Superintendent of Convicts, 13 and 15 December 1841; on the origins of solitary confinement as a reform, see Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979 [1833]), cited in Kris Inwood and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “Solitary confinement and health and other life course outcomes for convict women,” History Australia 19, no. 1 (2022): 14 ︎
9. Inwood and Maxwell-Stewart, “Solitary confinement and health and other life course outcomes for convict women,” 13–33. ︎
10. Inwood and Maxwell-Stewart, “Solitary confinement,” 26–30. ︎
11. LC346/3/2, Launceston Lower Court 1845–1846, DI 47, 28 February 1845; LC346/1/14, Launceston Lower Court, DI 215, 17 May 1845; LC346/1/14, DI 282, 14 August 1845; LC346/3/2, DI 387, 15 September 1845; transcriptions courtesy of the Female Convicts Research Centre database (record additions MW, 2023–24). ︎
12. Cornwall Chronicle, Launceston, 16 August 1848, 2. ︎
13. Cornwall Chronicle, Launceston, 20 August 1845; Cornwall Chronicle, Launceston, 17 September 1845; on the marriage and the likely misattribution of later “Mary Ann Powell” court appearances, Female Convicts Research Centre database, research notes, femaleconvicts.org.au. ︎
14. Tasmanian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, death registration, Mary Ann Powell, Launceston, 5 July 1862, cause of death: consumption. ︎

The post Ten Days for One: Mary Ann Clements and the Cost of the Dark Cell appeared first on Hobart History.

          The footnote rarely mentions that Weston was Premier twice. His seventeen days in 1857 were followed, three and a half years later, by a second term of 274 days, from 1 November 1860 to 2 August 1861. This time he was a member of the Legislative Council for Longford rather than the House of Assembly.[i]

          The number is correct. The story behind it is not what the number implies.

The Man Who Brought Down a Government

          Weston was elected to the first House of Assembly, serving from 2 December 1856, representing the electorate of Ringwood. He did not spend his first months in parliament as a bystander amid the three governments of 1857: he was one of its authors. Weston moved the vote of no confidence that brought down Thomas Gregson’s ministry in April 1857, ending Gregson’s 58 days in office.[ii]

          After toppling the government, Weston was called upon to form one of his own. He served as Premier without portfolio for about three weeks.

The Handover

          Here is where the standard framing breaks down. Weston’s seventeen days did not end in defeat, resignation under pressure, or the kind of no-confidence vote collapse that had ended Gregson’s term. He resigned the leadership of the government to Francis Smith once he judged the ministry was stable.

 A contemporary Hobart newspaper reported him standing down, having seen the government he’d formed “firmly consolidated,” and doing so out of “a strong sense of his obligations” rather than any loss of support.[iii] He kept his seat in the Executive Council without portfolio, staying inside the tent rather than walking away from politics.

This was not a man who couldn’t hold power. He had built a working ministry, handed the top job to someone he judged better placed to hold it long-term, and stayed close enough to the centre of government to return to it later.

The Return

Smith went on to hold the premiership for three years and 173 days, the longest of any of the colony’s first five premiers, providing the stability the young parliament badly needed after its first six months. When Smith left the role in 1860 to become Chief Justice, Weston returned to the premiership, holding it for a second term of 274 days.

Read against that arc, “seventeen days” stops looking like a symbol of instability and starts looking like exactly what it was: a short, deliberate caretaker term that set up four more years of continuity, followed by a second premiership of Weston’s own nine months later. The repeated number is accurate. The story it’s usually attached to is not.

[i] There is no rule requiring Tasmania’s Premier to sit in the House of Assembly rather than the Legislative Council. It is a convention, not a constitutional requirement. The practice hardened only gradually, as it did in most Westminster systems, since a head of government sitting in an upper house that does not control supply or confidence becomes politically untenable. Eight premiers were drawn from the Legislative Council before the convention settled, the last being Philip Fysh, serving from 1887–1892.

[ii] Next in this series: back to Thomas Gregson: the man Weston brought down, and what actually ended his 58 days in office.

[iii] Courier (Hobart) 14 October 1857, p 2. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2460893

The post Seventeen Days, On Purpose appeared first on Hobart History.

In September 1837, Captain Alexander Maconochie, a naval officer, geographer, and private secretary to Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin, sat down in Hobart and wrote the most damaging assessment of the Van Diemen’s Land convict system that any official had yet produced. The result, Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c., was presented to both Houses of Parliament in London the following year, reprinted in Hobart by William Gore Elliston, and then largely disappeared from easy view. The copy behind this article came from a digitised scan held by Trove, the National Library of Australia’s archive.[1]

The report argues that the convict system’s worst problems were also its most invisible ones.

How the report came to be written

Maconochie hadn’t set out to become a critic of the transportation system. Before he left England with Franklin in 1836, the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline[2] had asked him to look into how the convict system actually operated in the penal colonies, with a view to corresponding with them about it. When Maconochie referred this request to the Colonial Office, Sir George Grey directed him to treat the subject as one on which information was welcome, but to provide his report only to His Majesty’s Government, not with the Society directly. The report that resulted was authorised, expected, and addressed to the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, by name.

Maconochie was careful to establish his own credibility as a witness. He noted that his position as Franklin’s private secretary had let him see more of the colony’s workings, across every level of society, than almost anyone else could have in the same span of time, and that he had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land with no strong opinions on transportation at all. If anything, he wrote, “my bias was certainly in favour of its existing institutions.”[3] His conclusions weren’t the product of reforming zeal looking for a cause. They were what he said the evidence had forced on him.

The case against the assignment system

The heart of the report is a numbered indictment of the assignment system: the practice of handing newly arrived convicts over to private settlers as unpaid, effectively coerced labour, for years at a stretch, with a ticket-of-leave as the only prospect of relief.

Maconochie’s central complaint wasn’t that the system was harsh. It was that it was arbitrary. Only offences were officially recorded, never good conduct and “a careless fellow, however good his disposition and intentions, especially if he has had an indifferent master, may have a long list against him, while a thorough villain, more happily circumstanced… may have few or none.”[4] A man’s fate under assignment depended almost entirely on which master he happened to be handed to, and not on anything he had done, good or bad.

He pressed the comparison to slavery directly: convicts as slaves, masters as slaveholders. Masters had no lasting property interest in preserving a convict the way a slaveholder had in a slave, which tended to produce a master “of the worst character”[5] for it. And he insisted the fault lay in the structure of the system, not in the men running it: “these inconveniences are but in a very small degree dependant on the administration of the system… the cause lies much deeper than the mere personal character of successive Governors.”[6] Colony after colony, Governor after Governor, the same complaints recurred, which told him the problem wasn’t who was in charge, but what they had been asked to run.

He backed the argument with numbers that would have been hard to explain away. In 1836, one in every 105 people in Van Diemen’s Land had been convicted before the Supreme Court or Quarter Sessions, against roughly one in a thousand in England, and one in thirteen hundred in Scotland. Drunkenness convictions among the free population alone ran at 14%, against under 2% in London. A footnote citing the colony’s Director-General of Roads found that convict labour, as currently organised, returned only fifteen pence of value for every three shillings it ought to have produced. This was a loss, in that department alone, of £30,000 a year.

The remedy: separate punishment from reform

Maconochie’s proposed fix, later developed into the mark system he would go on to trial at Norfolk Island, rests on a single structural move: stop trying to punish and reform a man through the same process, at the same time, in the hands of the same private master.

Under his plan, punishment would come first. This would be hard labour at dedicated stations, away from the free population, with religious, mechanical, and agricultural instruction attached. Only afterward would training begin, and it would look nothing like assignment. Convicts would be grouped into small, self-selected parties of around six men, who would earn or forfeit marks each evening according to their conduct. They were never to be punished summarily,[7] only by the gain or loss of marks, with the whole party’s fate bound together. A man who let his group down would drag the others back with him. Maconochie was explicit that this was the engine of the system: that peer accountability, not physical coercion, would do the moral work that assignment couldn’t.

A ticket-of-leave, once earned this way, should come with far fewer restrictions than the colony currently imposed. It would see an end to the frequent musters and curfews that made even nominal freedom a form of continued policing.

The endorsements

The report’s appendix includes three testimonials, and they’re worth reading almost as closely as the report itself.

Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, agreed with Maconochie’s account of the existing system’s failures, though he stopped short of endorsing the replacement. He noted, tellingly, that it was already unclear whether the Home Government intended to keep transportation going at all.

James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, the Quaker missionaries who had spent five years touring the Australian penal colonies, wrote in strong support across three separate letters. They also offered something Maconochie’s own report lacked: a working precedent. At Macquarie Harbour, they noted, reformed prisoners had once been allowed to associate voluntarily in a separate room from the rest of the convict population. This looked like a rough, partial version of Maconochie’s grouped-probation idea “and, though it fell far short of that now proposed, yet it worked well.”[8]

The sharpest letter, though, comes from Alfred Stephen, VDL’s former Attorney-General. He called reformation under the existing system “hopeless,” and illustrated why, with a contrast that does more work than any statistic: a first-time convict, “dull, though willing,” lands a hard master and is broken by the experience, while “another fellow, scarred all over with crime, perhaps an educated burglar… becomes a house servant in some town establishment… wears a livery, sleeps on a bed of down, and lives in luxury.” Stephen’s question still lands: “Is this lottery, where the prizes are generally to the worst, fit for the established system of punishment of a great nation?” [9]  He backed it with gaol returns from Launceston and Hobart showing that of seventy men committed for trial that month, forty-six were emancipated convicts already reoffending, not first-time free settlers turning to crime.

Reading the report today

None of this changed the system quickly, or in the way Maconochie hoped. But the report did real work: it was used by the Molesworth Committee’s 1838 inquiry into transportation. Maconochie’s report raised a storm in Hobart, particularly with two powerful officials: Colonial Secretary John Montagu and Chief Police Magistrate Matthew Forster, who saw Maconochie as the enemy for being critical of the system they administered. This conflict cost Maconochie his position within the colony. He would get his chance to test the ideas anyway, on Norfolk Island, a few years later.

A full copy of the report, digitised from the Trove holding, is available along with the original scan for anyone who wants to check a quotation against the source.

Primary source: Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c. By Captain Maconochie (London: printed by W. Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; reprinted Hobart Town: William Gore Elliston, 1838). Digitised copy: Trove, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-366494214.

[1] https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/74VvE5lZ0zdM

[2] Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders. It was founded in London by a group of Quakers connected to Elizabeth Fry, joined by Evangelical Anglicans. Samuel Hoare (Quaker banker, Fry’s brother-in-law) chaired it, and Thomas Fowell Buxton was among the committee’s leading reformers. It functioned as a lobbying body pressuring the government on prison reform, focused on classifying prisoners (separating convicted from untried, serious from minor offenders) and providing prison labour to prevent idleness, though notably it supported both Bentham’s Panopticon design and the treadwheel as hard labour. It helped drive the Gaols Act of 1823, and by 1824 fifty-four prisons had adopted its recommended disciplinary system. It also had international reach: founding member Walter Venning set up a sister society in St. Petersburg in 1819.

[3] Alexander Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c. (London: W. Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; reprinted Hobart Town: William Gore Elliston, 1838), letter to Lord John Russell, 30 September 1837, p. 3. Digitised copy: Trove, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-366494214.

[4] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 5.

[5] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 6.

[6] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 7.

[7] Summary punishment means punishment imposed by a person in authority, typically a magistrate. This would occur quickly and directly following the infraction, without the formal process of a trial: no indictment, no jury, no right of appeal. It’s the opposite of punishment following conviction at a full court (assizes, quarter sessions, or the Supreme Court), where the accused has the protections of a proper hearing. In the convict-system this is the distinction that mattered. Serious crimes, capital offences and felonies, went to the Supreme Court by indictment, with a jury and from 1837 the right to defence counsel. But breaches of convict discipline such as insolence, drunkenness, absconding, refusing to work or disobedience, were dealt with summarily: a single magistrate, often acting on nothing more than the master’s or overseer’s complaint. The magistrate could order a flogging, extra labour, or solitary confinement on the spot. No jury, just minimal process, and the magistrate was frequently a settler himself with every incentive to side with the master.

[8] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 13.

[9] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 14.

The post Maconochie’s 1838 Report: The Document the Colonial Administration Didn’t Want Written appeared first on Hobart History.

Four men, the same crime, two different fates

Here’s the clearest case. On 20 March 1844, the Council reviewed the convictions of four men: Joseph Bowers, Matthew Byrnes, Peter Byrnes, and George Bristol, all convicted of the same offence: aiding and abetting an attempted murder.

The Colonial Secretary’s own assessment was that Peter Byrnes and Joseph Bowers “did not exert themselves so much as the others” and could reasonably be spared the noose. Fair enough. That’s at least an attempt at individual judgment.

But then, in the very next breath, he writes that George Bristol, while convicted of the same crime, with only a matter of degree separating his conduct from the men just pardoned, “must be excepted for the sake of example.”

Not because the evidence against him was stronger. Not because he was more dangerous. Because somebody had to die to send a message, and it might as well be him.

The same phrase, used to save a life

What makes this so chilling isn’t just that it happened once. It’s that the reasoning was explicit, procedural, and reversible. It was a lever the Council pulled in both directions depending on what they judged the moment required.

In October 1845, Daniel Priest was convicted of armed robbery and slated for execution. Weeks later, after a petition signed by more than 600 local residents, the Governor changed course. His stated reason: after conferring again with the Chief Justice, they’d concluded that executing Priest “was not… required for the sake of example, and therefore might be dispensed with.”

Read those two entries side by side and the logic becomes unmistakable. A man’s guilt was almost beside the point. What mattered was a standing calculation about deterrence, how many hangings the convict population currently “required” for them to stay in line. Bristol died because the Council judged an example was needed. Priest lived because they judged it wasn’t. The men themselves are almost incidental to the decision being made about them.

This wasn’t a slip: it was the stated theory of punishment

I want to be fair to the historical context here, because this wasn’t sadism or careless cruelty. It was a coherent, openly argued theory of criminal justice, and the Executive Council minutes let you watch these men in power reason their way into it without a flicker of self-doubt. Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s was, functionally, a prison island holding tens of thousands of transported convicts under a probation system the administrators themselves worried was fraying.

Executions were understood as public theatre aimed at the other convicts: a warning to the masses, not a reckoning with the individual in the dock. You can see the Colonial Secretary say as much explicitly in a different entry, arguing that an offence “assumes in this Colony a very different character… because from the circumstances in which we are placed, it is here much more dangerous to the peace and well-being of the Community” than the identical act would be in England. The crime was being judged not on its own moral weight but on its usefulness as a cautionary tale.****

That is what should make you angry. Not that these men were cruel by the standards of their time, plenty of their contemporaries objected to exactly this kind of reasoning, but that a system of government allowed men to sit in a room, and record in writing, that they treated a human being’s life as an input to a public-order calculation. The wording in the paperwork is polite. The Council “regrets.” They “cannot but advise.” They write in the passive voice of men doing their sad duty. And underneath every one of those careful sentences is a decision to kill a specific, named person not principally for what he did, but for what his death might do for everyone watching.

Why it’s worth sitting with

It would be comforting to file this under “the past was barbaric, we’ve moved on.” But the logic of for the sake of example – punishing one person harder than their individual conduct warrants, in order to deter a wider population – hasn’t vanished from how societies think about punishment. It shows up any time someone argues a sentence should be harsher to send a message, rather than because it fits the person and the act. The 1840s version is just unusually easy to see, because the men writing it down had no reason to hide what they were doing. They obviously thought it was sound governance.

Reading George Bristol’s name next to Peter Byrnes and Joseph Bowers’ – men judged together, then separated by a single administrative flourish – is a useful, uncomfortable reminder of what it looks like when a government stops asking “what does this person deserve” and starts asking “what does killing this person accomplish for me.”

NB: I wrote the piece above as carefully as I could, but carefully isn’t the same as calmly, and it wasn’t how I actually felt while reading these Executive Council minutes. If you’d rather read the unfiltered version, [I let myself be angry about it here]  

______________________________

Sourced from the Executive Council Minutes of Van Diemen’s Land, Council Room, Hobart Town, 1843 – 1847 (folios 310 – 311 and 379 -380).

*The men on the Executive council in this period:
1843–1847 period, cross-checked against the minutes themselves:

Lieutenant Governor His Excellency
Sir John Franklin held the post until August 1843, so the earliest entry (29 June 1843) falls under him.
Sir John Eardley-Wilmot then served 21 August 1843 – 13 October 1846.There’s a roughly three-month gap before Sir William Thomas Denison arrived on 25 January 1847. Denison is the Sir W. T. Denison who appears by name presiding from 21 July 1847.

Colonial Secretary James Ebenezer Bicheno, in office 20 April 1843 – 25 February 1851 (he died in the role). He’s the J.E. Bicheno who signs a memo in the minutes in August 1847.

Colonial Treasurer Adam Turnbull, who the record confirms worked alongside Bicheno under Denison, matching the A. Turnbull Esq. named in the July 1847 entries. He was also, per the minutes themselves, Chief Commissioner of the Land Board.

Chief Police Magistrate Captain Matthew Forster held this role from 1833 and is almost certainly the unnamed “Mr Forster” proposing the Field Police scheme in the June 1843 entry. Francis Burgess was appointed his successor and arrived in Hobart on 23 September 1843, so he’s the Chief Police Magistrate named F. Burgess from later 1843 onward. Usefully, this also explains something odd in the minutes: Burgess was sent to serve as judge of the Norfolk Island Criminal Court in June 1846 and returned to Hobart by September due to ill health — matching exactly the Mr Burgess… as Judge of the Criminal Court of Norfolk Island entry from 2 October 1846.

Chief Justice Sir John Lewes Pedder, who held the post continuously from 1824 to 1854, spanning this entire volume.

Puisne Judge His Honor, the second judge, Mr Justice Montagu by name in a few entries. Algernon Sidney Montagu, appointed 1833. He remained in the role throughout this period; he wasn’t dismissed until later in 1847, after this volume ends.

Anglican Lord Bishop Francis Russell Nixon, first Bishop of Tasmania, arrived 1843, matching his request for 18 months’ leave in the April 1846 entry.

Roman Catholic Bishop Willson Robert William Willson, consecrated 1842, arrived in Hobart 11 May 1844, matching his first appearance in the minutes and his own leave request in June 1846.

Senior Officer commanding the troops before 1847, by 21 July 1847 he’s named as Colonel Hulme, directly in the minutes, so far no name for the equivalent officer in 1843–46

Attorney General oddly, the record shows that Edward Macdowell, who’d earlier held that post, was by 1843 out of office and instead working as Martin Cash’s own defence lawyer at trial, so far no confirmation who held the Attorney-Generalship while the Council was actually deliberating Cash’s fate.

Crown Solicitor – Mr Stonor, granted leave in October 1846

**Executive Council Minute No. 2 (Matthew Byrnes and George Bristol’s case), 20 March 1844, Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council (EC4), Executive Council (TA62), Tasmanian Archives, Hobart, EC4/1/8, fol. 311.

****Executive Council Minute 42-43, 6 September 1843, Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council (EC4), Executive Council (TA62), Tasmanian Archives, Hobart, EC4/1/8, fol. 301–303.

The post “For the Sake of Example”: How Colonial Tasmania turned human lives into a deterrence strategy appeared first on Hobart History.

“…should this service be performed by any convict … a Free Pardon … then a Passage from the Colony free of expense.”²

That last part turned out to be doing more work than whoever drafted it probably intended.

A six-man, all-convict posse

Jeffs and Conway spent three weeks evading a police party out of Campbell Town before they were run to ground on 2 June, cornered behind trees near a shepherd’s hut on the South Esk. The constable who caught them, Thomas Cannell, later testified that he and five others: Joseph Massam, Matthew Berry, Edward Quin, Aaron Dresser and Stephen Wright, had been “in pursuit of the bushrangers up to the 2nd of June,” and that it was Berry and Dresser who held the pair at bay while the rest of the party closed in.³

What the placard didn’t advertise, and what the courtroom record makes plain, is that this was a manhunt run almost entirely by convicts. Cannell was serving fourteen years, transported per Recovery. Massam, Berry and Quin already held tickets-of-leave. Dresser and Wright were both still under sentence for life, transported per Buffalo.⁴ Van Diemen’s Land caught its own bushrangers with its own prisoners – a detail the government notice recorded without ever remarking on it.

What “Hundred Sovereigns” turned out to mean

The placard’s wording is genuinely ambiguous: a reward “of One Hundred Sovereigns… for capturing… both or either” reads, on a literal parse, like a flat £100, however many murderers were taken. In practice, the Executive Council’s minute of 16 June records the Chief Police Magistrate recommending £200, “to be divided equally amongst” the captors.⁵ A week later, Government Notice No. 153 confirmed it: not £100 split six ways, and not £200 either, but £33 6s 8d to each of the six men, plus, for every one of them, a Free Pardon.⁶ Whatever “One Hundred Sovereigns” was meant to mean, the men who actually caught Jeffs and Conway ended up splitting exactly £200 – arithmetic that only works if the reward was really £100 per murderer, doubled because the party brought in both.

Two “Canadians” who were mostly American

The Executive Council’s meeting minutes flag a complication before the ink on the Government Notice was even dry: “two of the Men entitled to the Reward are Canadians, ‘per Buffalo’”, and the Chief Police Magistrate needed authority to handle their passage.⁵ They meant Dresser and Wright, except neither man was Canadian. Stephen Wright was a 25-year-old from Lewis County, New York, captured at the Battle of the Windmill near Prescott in November 1838; Aaron Dresser was a carpenter from Jefferson County, New York, taken in the same run of failed cross-border raids known as the Patriot War.⁷ Both had been swept up with the mostly English-speaking rebel force from Upper Canada, tried for “piratical invasion,” sentenced to transportation for life, and shipped out of Quebec on HMS Buffalo in September 1839 alongside dozens of genuine Canadians. This was evidently reason enough for the colonial government to file them under “Canadian prisoners” for the rest of their sentences. An official Gazette notice from February 1842 lists both men by name under exactly that heading.⁸

It wasn’t just careless paperwork. The standard scholarly account of these prisoners, Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s American Citizens, British Slaves, makes the point plainly: “Not being British subjects, their transportation was almost certainly illegal.”⁹ Dresser and Wright’s entire convict status in Van Diemen’s Land – the sentence that put them in that six-man posse in the first place – rested on legal ground the British government itself likely couldn’t have defended.

The promise, and what actually happened next

The reward mechanics moved fast, at least locally. Dresser’s conduct record shows his ticket-of-leave was “sanctioned… on the express condition that they shall reside in the following districts only,” and explicitly credits it to “his involvement in the capture of bushrangers & murderers Jeffs & Conway,” dated 22 June 1843 — the same week as the Government Notice.¹⁰ Wright’s record shows a “Free pardon as per Gazette” dated 23 June, one day later.¹¹ The Franklin administration then made good on the placard’s promise of free passage, putting both men aboard the brigantine Areta bound for London. On reaching England, the American Minister, Edward Everett, arranged their onward passage to New York aboard the Quebec.¹² Dresser and Wright’s own account of their captivity ran in the New York Tribune on 20 February 1844; the New York Herald had already reported their return a week earlier. By May, Wright had a ghost-written memoir on sale in Manhattan bookshops.¹²

Here is the detail that makes the placard’s fine print worth revisiting: the Colonial Secretary’s Office in Hobart didn’t publish until 9 May 1844 a notice confirming that the Crown itself, “Her Majesty’s gracious allowance,” had ratified Dresser’s and Wright’s free pardons.¹³ By then the two men had been back in the United States for the better part of three months, giving newspaper interviews about a captivity that a colonial pardon hadn’t yet, on paper, actually ended. Van Diemen’s Land had promised them freedom, money, and a ticket home in June 1843, and made good on all three well before London’s own machinery caught up. Had anything gone wrong with the Areta, or with Everett’s arrangements in London, or had the Crown simply declined to ratify what Hobart had already announced, two men who’d risked being shot capturing an armed murderer for the Van Diemen’s Land government would have found themselves free in fact but not yet in law, on the wrong side of the world from either.

What became of the men they caught

Jeffs and Conway were convicted of Ward’s murder in the first days of July 1843 and sentenced to death on 10 July. When the Chief Justice’s report came before the Executive Council a week later, the Council declined to recommend mercy for either man: “under the existing circumstances in which the Colony is placed with respect to Bushrangers an example is absolutely required,” despite the jury’s own recommendation of mercy for Jeffs. Both men were hanged at Launceston on 26 July 1843, within weeks of the six men who caught them collecting their reward money. The same Council session voted Ward’s widow with their numerous children a pension of £30 a year for life, a sum the Lieutenant-Governor apologised for even as he proposed it, regretting only “that the funds of the Colony are not now such as to admit of a more liberal provision being made for her.”¹⁴

Three outcomes, from one placard: two men hanged on schedule, a widow pensioned at a rate her benefactor called for regretting, and two convict-constables shipped home so promptly that the paperwork proving them legally free didn’t exist yet when they got there.

Notes

1. Trial testimony reported in “SUPREME COURT — CRIMINAL SITTINGS,” Launceston Advertiser, 6 July 1843, p. 2.

2. Reward placard of 10 May 1843, reproduced from Courier, 12 May 1843, page 2

3. Testimony of Thomas Cannell and Matthew Berry, Launceston Advertiser, 6 July 1843, p. 2.

4. Government Notice No. 153, Colonial Secretary’s Office, 22 June 1843, published in the Courier, 30 June 1843, p. 4; conduct records CON31-1-12 and CON31-1-48, Tasmanian Archives.

5. Executive Council of Van Diemen’s Land, Minute No. 982, 16 June 1843, “Executive Council VDL minutes – NI Convicts – 27 Dec 1842 – 17 July 1843,” scanned p. [21], 22a.

6. Government Notice No. 153, Colonial Secretary’s Office, 22 June 1843, published in the Courier (Hobart), 30 June 1843, p. 4.

7. John C. Carter, “Remembrances of Rebellion: The Odyssey of Stephen S. Wright,” Thousand Islands Life Magazine, March 2023, https://thousandislandslife.com/remembrances-of-rebellion-the-odyssey-of-stephen-s-wright/; conduct record CON31-1-12, Aaron Dresser, Tasmanian Archives,

8. “GAZETTE. GOVERNMENT NOTICE No. 47,” Colonial Secretary’s Office, 10 February 1842, published in the Courier, 11 February 1842

9. Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839–1850 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002)

10. Conduct record CON31-1-12, Aaron Dresser, Tasmanian Archives

11. Conduct record CON31-1-48, Stephen S. Wright, Tasmanian Archives

12. Carter, “Remembrances of Rebellion: The Odyssey of Stephen S. Wright.”

13. “GOVERNMENT NOTICE,” Colonial Secretary’s Office, 9 May 1844, Colonial Times, 14 May 1844

14. Executive Council of Van Diemen’s Land, Minute No. 5, 17 July 1843, Executive Council VDL minutes 27 Dec 1842 – 17 July 1843, pp245-246

The post Free Pardon, Fine Print: The Bushranger Reward That Sent Two Exiles Home Ahead of Their Own Paperwork appeared first on Hobart History.

          The Executive Council minutes for that week record a letter from the Chief Police Magistrate, passing on a complaint from the Reverend William Bedford. Two convicts, William Langham (per Mangles, 1835) and Thomas Shaw (per Neptune 1838), both recently brought up from Port Arthur on capital charges, had told the gaol clerk on arrival that they were Roman Catholic. This was a problem, because both men were already recorded in the government’s books as Protestants, and had been ever since they stepped on to their transport ships. Nothing in their history suggested any Catholic upbringing or belief. The conversion had happened, as far as anyone could tell, somewhere between the dock at Port Arthur and the gates of the Hobart Gaol: and it had happened only after each man knew he was likely to hang.

          Governor Sir John Franklin did not think this was a coincidence, and said so to his Executive Council members. Convicts, he observed, were questioned carefully on arrival about their religion, with every effort made to ensure the answer was given sincerely. The question now was whether a man who had made that declaration years earlier should, once in the condemned cell and for reasons “evidently unconnected with any conscientious or religious motives,” be allowed to send for a minister of an entirely different faith. Franklin went further, noting what he understood to be common knowledge among the convict population: that Catholic priests would keep whatever was confided to them in the strictest secrecy, while Church of England clergymen would not. It was this belief, he suggested, that was driving condemned men to discover a Catholic conscience only once the rope was in sight.

          It’s worth sitting with what was actually at stake here for Langham and Shaw. A minister who might repeat what he heard to the authorities was of no use to a man weighing up a last confession, an appeal, or simply a final reckoning he wanted kept private. A priest bound by the seal of confession was a different proposition altogether: someone to whom you could say anything without it finding its way back to the Colonial Secretary’s office. Whether or not the sacramental seal was really as impermeable as convict folklore held, the belief alone was enough to make a sudden discovery of Catholicism a rational, if cynical, move for a man with days or weeks left to live.

          The Council was split on what to do about it. The Colonial Secretary took the sympathetic view: many convicts sent to the colony had no real religion at all, had probably never given the matter serious thought until they found themselves in “the awful predicament now contemplated,” and ought to be allowed spiritual support from whatever minister they chose when under threat of a death sentence being passed. It was, in his reading, better to let a man face death with whatever comfort he could find than to hold him to a label recorded years before under very different circumstances.

          The Chief Police Magistrate, Matthew Forster, disagreed, and disagreed firmly. Since the greatest care was already taken to establish each convict’s religion on arrival, he argued, the government had fully discharged its duty by providing instruction according to that original declaration. To allow a switch now would be to permit exactly the kind of interference Bedford was complaining about — ministers of one denomination reaching into the pastoral territory of another, on the say-so of a man under sentence of death.

          The Colonial Treasurer, Adam Turnbull, concurred, adding a pointed practical objection: prisoners under sentence, or awaiting trial, sometimes had reasons for wanting a different minister that had nothing to do with religion at all. Allowing convicts to change their professed faith so easily, he warned, simply exposed them to solicitation by priests eager to make converts of the condemned. The Senior Officer sided with the stricter view, and the minute ends there — Franklin’s Council divided down the middle on whether a man facing the gallows should be allowed to choose, at the very end, who he confided in.

          The bureaucratic dryness of the minute gives no hint of just how urgent this question was for the two men actually named in it. Both had, in fact, just been tried at the Supreme Court sessions that same fortnight, and their stories explain exactly why each might have wanted a confessor he could trust.

          Thomas Shaw, transported at twenty-one and by 1842 a labourer in the Port Arthur brickmakers’ gang, went on trial on 19 July 1842 for the wilful murder of Richard Pickley, an overseer found dead in his hut with a cut to the head and a neckerchief knotted twice around his throat. The case against Shaw was circumstantial but pointed: he had absconded the night Pickley was killed, was found the next evening wearing the dead man’s shirt and trousers and carrying his razor and looking-glass, and had reportedly told a constable, when asked about a spot on the razor, “it is not blood; I did not use that- I used a stick.” The Attorney-General openly criticised the police for extracting a confession improperly from the accused, and the presiding judge repeatedly cautioned constables in the box over how they had questioned Shaw. After deliberating from four in the afternoon until eight at night, the jury returned a verdict that startled the courtroom: not guilty. Shaw was returned to the custody of the Sheriff as a prisoner of the Crown, his life spared by a verdict the reporter noted was “contrary to the expectation of the spectators.” He would live another sixteen years, dying under sentence on 22 January 1858.

          William Langham had no such reprieve waiting for him. Tried the very next day, 20 July, for stabbing and cutting the Assistant Colonial Surgeon Dr Brownell at Port Arthur with intent to murder, Langham was accused of lunging at the doctor with a crudely made prison knife while feigning a complaint about his eyes, catching him across the jaw before being wrestled down by a constable.

          The jury convicted him only on the lesser count of cutting with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. It was not enough to save him. The following day, Langham was brought back before the court on a second, far graver indictment: stabbing a boy named Thomas Cook in his cell at Port Arthur on 14 May, holding him by the neck as though about to embrace him before driving a knife into his throat two or three times. Cook survived only because a constable answered his cries for help before Langham could finish what he’d started; Dr Brownell later testified that a slightly more forward stab would have killed him instantly.

          Constable Dickenson told the court that when he pulled Langham off the boy, the prisoner’s only regret was that his knife had broken, otherwise, he said, “he would have cut his b—-y windpipe out.” The jury took five minutes to convict him. On Saturday 23 July 1842, William Langham was formally sentenced to death.

          Read against that timeline, the Executive Council’s minute takes on a sharper edge. This was not an abstract policy question about religious liberty in the colony. It was Franklin’s government trying to work out, in real time, what to do about a man under sentence of death who had suddenly become Catholic in the days surrounding his own capital trial, and whether Bedford, as the Anglican minister whose claim on Langham had just been quietly discarded, had grounds to complain that the change was tactical rather than spiritual. Shaw’s case is murkier, since he walked free from his own trial and had less obvious need of a confessor immune from official ears, but he too had spent that same fortnight in the cells at the Hobart Gaol awaiting a verdict that could easily have gone the other way, and his conversion was lodged with the authorities before that verdict came in.

          Whatever the Council eventually settled on in practice, the exchange preserved in the minutes of this meeting is a small, sharp window into the emotional and institutional pressure of a capital sentence in convict Van Diemen’s Land: a system that recorded a man’s soul on arrival like an item of kit, and then had to decide, years later, whether that record still held once the gallows came into view.

Sources

• Executive Council, Van Diemen’s Land, Minutes 27 July 1842 – 16 June 1843, page 24
• Thomas Shaw, conduct record CON31-1-41
• Thomas Shaw, record of death under sentence, 22 January 1858: CON63-1-2, Libraries Tasmania
• Supreme Court trial file, Rex v. Thomas Shaw (murder of Richard Pickley): SC32-1-4, Libraries Tasmania
• “Supreme Court,” Colonial Times, 26 July 1842

The post A Convenient Conversion: Two Condemned Men and the Question of Faith at the Gallows, 1842 appeared first on Hobart History.

          The Executive Council that morning was the Governor, Sir John Franklin, together with the senior officer of Her Majesty’s forces, the Colonial Secretary, the Colonial Treasurer, and the Chief Police Magistrate.[i] Their business was Minute No. 161, filed under a marginal note that undersells the stakes considerably: “Jones’ refusal to attend Divine Service at Port Arthur.” But Franklin did not treat it as a trivial matter of prison discipline. He told the Council he had called them together to discuss “the Discipline and security of the Penal Establishment at Port Arthur,” and that he was seeking their advice on a case that touched something he regarded as dangerously close to breaking point. [ii]

          The convict in question was Richard Jones: Dublin Ribbon Society secretary, accused mutineer, and, in the eyes of the colony’s most senior official, a genuine threat to order at the Empire’s harshest prison.

A Dublin conspirator bound for Van Diemen’s Land

          Jones was no ordinary transportee. Historian Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s study of shipboard mutinies identifies him as the permanent secretary of Dublin Ribbonism from the early 1830s. This was an anti-Protestant secret society that combined agrarian defence with the trappings of a benefit club, complete with its own passwords, oaths, and quasi-Masonic signs.[iii]

          Dublin Castle[iv] suspected him of a hand in the 1836 destruction of the William III statue on College Green, and he had worked to link the Dublin lodges to Ribbon networks across northern Leinster and Ulster.[v] Convicted in Dublin in 1840 and sentenced to seven years transportation, he sailed for Van Diemen’s Land on the Isabella Watson in May 1842.[vi]

          He put his organising experience to immediate use. According to Maxwell-Stewart’s reconstruction of the shipboard plot, Jones approached the farm labourer James Byrne on 15 May and produced what was probably a Ribbon catechism book to bind him into a conspiracy to seize the ship, the same oath-and-signs apparatus he had run in Dublin. Most of his co-conspirators came from Cavan, Longford, and Meath, and all gave their religion as Catholic. Private Barney Macanally, relieving himself at the ship’s heads, was overheard telling two prisoners that sympathetic guards would “make their water on the pistols and flintlocks so that they would not go off” rather than help put down a mutiny. Later in the voyage another soldier was held in irons after he was seen exchanging Ribbonman signals with one of the prisoners.[vii] The plot was serious enough that, combined with two other attempts that year, Governor Franklin asked London to use naval vessels rather than merchant ships for future transports.[viii]

          Jones and eleven others were charged with piracy in the Hobart Supreme Court in September 1842. When the Crown’s key witnesses, officers of the Isabella Watson, failed to appear, having sailed on to Sydney, the prosecution collapsed and Justice Montagu directed an acquittal.[ix] Jones reportedly thanked the judge; the judge, by newspaper account, replied that he had only done his duty. The colonial press had already been following the case for weeks, with the Launceston Examiner and Launceston Courier both naming Jones as “ringleader” of a plot they described as aiming at the murder of the ship’s Protestants.[x]

          Acquitted of piracy, Jones was sent to Port Arthur to serve the probation stage of his original transportation sentence.

Refusing the pew

          It was there that a second confrontation began, and this one not with muskets, but with a pew. Jones was Catholic. Port Arthur’s standing orders required all convicts to attend Sunday service, which meant, for a Catholic prisoner in 1842, sitting through Wesleyan Methodist worship. Jones refused.

          On 19 September 1842 he was charged before Commandant Charles O’Hara Booth on the complaint of the settlement’s superintendent, Mr Carte, with “positively refusing to attend the Place of Divine Worship,” and sentenced to six days’ solitary confinement. A week later, on 26 September, he was charged again for the same offence and given five more days in solitary. On 8 October, six days before the Executive Council met, he was flogged with thirty-six lashes for leaving the place of worship without authority. By the time Franklin brought the matter to his Council, Jones had already been punished three times in three weeks, and the punishments were escalating.[xi]

          Jones did not just leave it at that. He tried to go over Booth’s head. He had earlier addressed an appeal to the colony’s Puisne Judge, believing, on the strength, he said, of words the judge had used at his piracy trial, that any prisoner treated harshly could apply to him directly. Franklin judged the appeal improper and returned it unread. Undeterred, Jones then sent a memorial to the Commandant and a separate letter to the Catholic priest Father John Joseph Therry, both dated 27 September, laying out his case: since arriving at Port Arthur he had been compelled to attend Wesleyan worship despite being Roman Catholic, had been punished for refusing, and asked to be allowed to remain in his cell on Sundays instead.[xii]

The Council convenes

          What makes the Executive Council meeting of 14 October remarkable is not that a colonial governor took an interest in one convict’s punishment record:  it is why. Franklin did not present Jones’s case to the Council as a matter of religious accommodation. He framed it as a security crisis.

          He told the assembled Council that his recent tour of Tasman’s Peninsula had left him seriously alarmed. The numbers of men confined at Port Arthur had grown rapidly, and among them, he said, were “most desperate characters,” particularly recent arrivals from New South Wales and from Ireland – a description that fitted Jones precisely. He had just heard of “a most frightful case of attempted murder” by an absconder from the Coal Mines station and relayed the details to the Council before turning to Jones’s file. The Council then had the Commandant’s memorandum of 30 September read out, along with extracts from the magisterial records documenting Jones’s two solitary confinements, his memorial, and his letter to Father Therry.[xiii]  

          Franklin also had two older despatches read into the record: his own dispatch of 21 July 1841 to the Secretary of State, urging the appointment of a Roman Catholic clergyman to Tasman’s Peninsula, and a reply from Lord John Russell on the same subject. This shows that the problem was not new to Franklin in October 1842. He had been pressing London for a Catholic chaplain at Port Arthur for well over a year, and Jones’s public defiance had now brought the issue to a head in front of his own Council.[xiv]

          Frustratingly for the historical record, the page or pages recording the Council’s actual advice have not survived among the documents so far located — the minute breaks off after the despatches are read, before any resolution is recorded.

Punishment continued — and, eventually, a concession

          Whatever was decided in the room on 14 October, it did not end Jones’s resistance, nor Port Arthur’s problem. He was charged twice more for refusing church on the same grounds: on 21 November 1842 (“positively refusing”), and again on 26 November (“obstinately refusing”), each time drawing further solitary confinement under Booth’s signature.[xv] Jones was not an isolated case, either. Catholic prisoners at Port Arthur more broadly kept up the pressure, continuing to refuse Protestant service and to press for their own priest.[xvi]

          The concession Franklin had been asking London for since 1841 eventually arrived. Father William Bond was appointed the first resident Roman Catholic chaplain at Port Arthur, with a chaplain’s house built for him in 1844. This was a direct institutional response to the standoff that Jones’s file had forced onto the Executive Council’s table in October 1842. It was a slow, grinding win, bought with solitary cells and the lash rather than any dramatic victory, but it was a win: the very demand in Jones’s September memorial: recognition that a Catholic prisoner should not be forced into a Protestant pew, was, within roughly eighteen months, built into the settlement’s fabric.

          Jones himself was released from the first stage of probation on 3 February 1843 and received his certificate of freedom on 21 June 1847.[xvii] What became of him after that has not been established from the sources gathered so far.

[i] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, Z1474

[ii] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85

[iii] Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “‘Those Lads Contrived a Plan’: Attempts at Mutiny on Australia-Bound Convict Vessels,” International Review of Social History 58 (2013), Special Issue, pp. 177–196, at p. 189, citing Tom Garvin, “Defenders, Ribbonmen and Others: Underground Political Networks in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Past and Present 96 (1982), pp. 133–155. See also Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Jones, Richard,” https://www.dib.ie/biography/jones-richard-a4338

[iv] Dublin Castle”: shorthand for the British administration in Ireland, seated at Dublin Castle — used here to mean the colonial authorities and police, not the building itself.

[v] Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Jones, Richard,” https://www.dib.ie/biography/jones-richard-a4338

[vi] TAHO CON33-1-26;  Founders and Survivors, “FAS Convict Ship 366.04 Isabella Watson arrived 1842 at VDL Prosopography Index,” https://researchdata.edu.au/fas-convict-ship-prosopography-index/395282

[vii] Maxwell-Stewart, “Those Lads Contrived a Plan,” pp. 189–190

[viii] Maxwell-Stewart, “Those Lads Contrived a Plan,” p. 194, citing Launceston Examiner, 23 September 1842.

[ix] TAHO SC32-1-4

[x] Hobart Town Advertiser, 6 September 1842; Launceston Examiner, 6 August 1842; Launceston Courier, 8 August 1842

[xi] TAHO CON33-1-26

[xii] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85

[xiii] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85

[xiv] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85

[xv] TAHO CON33-1-26

[xvi] On The Convict Trail, “Catholic Chaplain’s House, Port Arthur,” http://ontheconvicttrail.blogspot.com/2015/12/catholic-chaplins-house-port-arthur.html

[xvii] TAHO CON33-1-26

King William III statue image: https://www.dublincity.ie/library/blog/statue-king-william-iii

The post “A matter of extreme importance”: Richard Jones and the Executive Council, 1842 appeared first on Hobart History.

It reads as a footnote: an outgoing governor decamping to a country cottage while the colony adjusted to new management. In fact, it is the opening scene of one of the stranger episodes in early Tasmanian history: an attempt, pursued on and off for three years, to abolish Hobart as the capital of Van Diemen’s Land altogether.

The new Lieutenant-Governor was George Arthur, and according to Sorell, he arrived already convinced the colony was being run from the wrong place. Within months he was telling anyone who would listen that Hobart’s site was ‘exceedingly ill-judged… exposed to violent winds, extremely difficult of defense, and quite open to an attack by Sea,’ cut off from the settled interior by the Derwent. Worse still for a penal colony: holding convicts at seaports meant that escape by ship was always just half a chance away.[2]

By September 1824 the public knew Arthur wanted to shift the seat of government to a site called Brighton, a location Commissioner Bigge had flagged during his 1820 inspection of the colony. The idea smouldered for seven months before Arthur convened a meeting of the Gentlemen of the Colony on 19 May 1825 to make his case.[3]

          He offered three arguments:

• agriculturists would benefit from having the seat of government inland
• it was absolutely necessary to remove the convict population away from Hobart
• the town’s population could be limited to allow the settlement to spread into the interior

A report commissioned from a Mr Kinghorne was produced, promising that Brighton could supply water for 20,000 people all year round, and possessed everything required for a ‘great and splendid town.’ The meeting did not go Arthur’s way. Chief Justice John Pedder, Attorney-General Joseph Tice Gellibrand, and the merchant Anthony Fenn Kemp led three hours of opposition. The Gazette‘s correspondent recorded Arthur bearing it all well, and calmly heard – and countered – every objection. Rather more telling was the report’s throwaway line that ‘Mr. Mulgrave’s location at Brighton has been already purchased by Government.’ – public money was moving on the scheme before anyone outside Arthur’s circle had been properly consulted, let alone before London had even been asked.[4]

Hobart’s merchants responded with a formal letter of protest. The government’s own newspaper kept the pot boiling through to the end of 1825, with editor James Ross declaring in November that ‘the situation of Hobart Town was decidedly bad and obstructive to the general interest of the Colony, no reasonable man still disputes’ – and floating not just Brighton but New Norfolk, and even Perth, as alternatives.[5]

New Norfolk was not a name plucked out of nowhere. The town, known officially as Elizabeth Town from 1811 until locals reclaimed the older name in 1825, already had a government foothold. By 1815, Turiff Lodge, known locally as the Government Cottage, had been built specifically as a retreat for Van Diemen’s Land’s governors – two years before Sorell even took office, and long an established fixture of the role by the time he handed over to Arthur in 1824.[6]

A contemporary aquatint by the convict-artist-turned-publisher Joseph Lycett, titled ‘View of the Governor’s Retreat, New Norfolk, Van Diemen’s Land’ and dated around 1825, shows a substantial riverside estate in the town: house, granary, stables, walled garden, orchard, its own punt and ferry. It was advertised for sale while still ‘in the Occupation of His Majesty’s Government’ under a two-and-a-half-year lease.[7] Whether this was Turiff Lodge itself or a second government property in the same small town is not entirely clear, but either way, when Sorell rode out to the Government cottage at New Norfolk in May 1824, he was retiring to ground the colony’s rulers already knew well.

Officially, the decisive turn came in December 1825. Arthur put a formal proposal to his Executive Council, which resolved that a Land Commission survey then being organised, under the newly appointed Acting Surveyor-General Edward Dumaresq, assisted by Roderic O’Connor and Peter Murdoch, should be conducted specifically ‘with a view to the removal of the seat of Government to New Norfolk.’[8]

Arthur and his Council had committed the colony to the plan to move out of Hobart before a single report had come back. His formal notification to the Colonial Office followed on 22 April 1826, and it is a remarkable document: Giblin, writing in the 1930s, called its reasoning ‘paltry and unconvincing,’ so much so as to ‘throw doubt on their sincerity and genuineness.’ Arthur told Secretary of State Earl Bathurst that ‘every respectable Inhabitant’ he had met was as full of objections to Hobart as he was. He dismissed the protesting merchants with startling bluntness: their losses, he wrote, would be ‘only a just retribution’ for having ‘drained the Agricultural Interest to the last degree,’ and ‘there is nothing unreasonable in their being called upon to make some little restitution in this way.’ The change, he insisted, was needed for the prosperity of the Colony, the security of the prisoners, and so that convicts’ ‘dissolute habits and associations in Hobart Town should be effectually broken through.’ [9]

Behind the scenes, the scheme was already unravelling. A Hobart official named Humphrey had been privately urging Arthur’s predecessor Sorell, by then back in England, to support New Norfolk, without disclosing that his own property on the Styx River stood to benefit handsomely from the new road the plan required.[10] Sorell, unimpressed, wrote a long and cutting letter to Colonial Under-Secretary Robert Hay on 25 July 1826, tracing Arthur’s wandering choice of capital, first Launceston, then Brighton, now New Norfolk, and memorably comparing the whole business to ‘a person with a pack of cards putting up and pulling down houses for the amusement of children.’[11] No colony, he pointed out, had ever benefited from moving its capital away from its port, citing Canada, Nova Scotia, the West and East Indies, and New South Wales as evidence.[12]

The Land Commissioners then delivered the final blow. O’Connor and Murdoch condemned the scheme outright, arguing that a colony as young and as poor as Van Diemen’s Land had no business trying to force a second city into being. Only Dumaresq offered New Norfolk qualified support, and even he accompanied his report with a scheme for a bridge over the Derwent rather than a wholesale relocation of government.[13] Arthur, cornered, tried to argue in a second despatch that the move had always been intended as gradual rather than sudden, while announcing he would in fact build the colony’s badly needed gaol and barracks in Hobart because it was cheaper there: a retreat dressed up as patience.[14]

London’s verdict, when it came, was unambiguous. Bathurst’s reply of 3 November 1826 was, in Giblin’s assessment, ‘the severest censure the Lieutenant-Governor had received since his arrival in Van Diemen’s Land.’ Bathurst noted, pointedly, that he was inclined to favour Brighton over New Norfolk if any move were ever sanctioned (Bigge’s original recommendation, not Arthur’s) but made clear the whole idea was premature, expensive, and disruptive to property and settler expectations.[15]

Arthur’s second despatch drew a further, equally frosty reply, (Despatch No. 12, written from Downing Street on 12 February 1827), commending him only for eventually deferring to the local opinion he had ignored in the first place: You spoke before you had the facts, and should have stayed silent until you were sure the idea had merit. Three days after signing that despatch, Bathurst fired off an unrelated rebuke, ordering Arthur to sell off a Hobart courthouse he had purchased for £1,600 without authorisation: a second slap that Arthur, in a huff, tried to argue his way out of rather than accept.[16]

In the same letter, almost as an afterthought, Bathurst waved through a far more modest piece of infrastructure: a proposal from settlers in the interior to build, at their own expense, a toll bridge across the Derwent at New Norfolk. He saw no objection to it, provided the toll was time-limited and the government retained the right to take over its management once the debt was cleared. This was a small, self-funded, unglamorous scheme that sailed through without a trace of the suspicion Arthur’s grand design had provoked.

With the scheme of moving the capital to New Norfolk now dead, the practical problem it had been meant to solve – a colony split by the Derwent, with no easy crossing between its northern and southern halves – found a far more modest answer. A proposal first floated in Andrew Bent’s newspaper for a bridge near what became Bridgewater grew, through the later 1820s, into the causeway built there by convict labour between 1830 and 1836. It was one of the largest and most expensive convict engineering projects undertaken in the colony.[17] That causeway is still standing today, heritage-listed. The bridge spanning the main channel beside it has had a rather less settled history: it has been rebuilt five times since the 1840s, most recently in 2025, when a new $786 million Bridgewater Bridge replaced the lift-span crossing that had carried traffic since 1942.[18] New Norfolk, meanwhile, settled into quieter roles: a stop on the road to Hobart, and eventually, as Giblin wryly noted writing in 1930, ‘a quiet, secluded spot for honeymooners’ and the site of Tasmania’s asylum for the insane.[19]

Giblin, closing his account, admitted that Arthur’s true motive for the whole affair was not clarified and could not be easily explained.[20] Was it genuine strategic and moral conviction? Or did it, as Sorell suspected, stem from Arthur’s determination to be innovative and to build himself a vanity project?[21] Nearly two centuries on, with Hobart still the capital and New Norfolk still a quiet town on the Derwent, it is hard not to side with Sorell.

[1] Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 21 May 1824

[2] George Arthur to Earl Bathurst, despatch of 22 April 1826, Historical Records of Australia [HRA], Series III, Vol. V, p. 179

[3] Giblin, Early History of Tasmania, Volume 2, p561

[4] Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 20 May 1825

[5] Hobart Town Gazette, 12 November 1825

[6] New Norfolk, TAS, Aussie Towns, https://www.aussietowns.com.au/town/new-norfolk-tas

[7] https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/100678/

[8] Giblin, p. 562 (Executive Council minute, December 1825).

[9] George Arthur to Earl Bathurst, despatch of 22 April 1826, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 181

[10] Giblin, p. 564

[11] William Sorell to Under-Secretary R.W. Hay, 25 July 1826, quoted in Giblin, pp. 564–566, citing Public Record Office, Colonial Office papers [P.R.O., C.O.], 280-5

[12] Sorell to Hay, 25 July 1826, P.R.O., C.O. 280-5

[13] Giblin, p. 567 (Land Commissioners’ reports by O’Connor, Murdoch, and Dumaresq)

[14] Arthur’s second despatch to Bathurst, 12 July 1826, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 304

[15] Bathurst to Arthur (Despatch No. 51) 3 Nov 1826, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 386

[16] Bathurst to Arthur, 12 February 1827, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 521

[17] Hobart Town Gazette, 7 October 1826

[18] https://www.bridgewaterbridge.tas.gov.au/history-and-heritage

[19] Giblin, p. 568

[20] Giblin, p. 571

[21] Sorell to Hay, 25 July 1826, P.R.O., C.O. 280-5

The post The Vanishing Capital: Governor Arthur’s Forgotten Scheme to Move Hobart to New Norfolk appeared first on Hobart History.

The Supreme Court docket, by the numbers

Of the 53 executions carried out that year, only seven – five for murder and two as accessories to murder – involved a killing. That’s barely one in eight. Set against that: eighteen for burglary, fifteen for sheep stealing, two for theft, and one for arson – thirty-six people, or two in every three, hanged for offences where nobody was harmed at all. The remaining ten went to the gallows for armed robbery: menace and threat, but again, no body. Even counting those armed robbery cases alongside the murders, fully two-thirds of the year’s executions were for crimes committed against property, not people.

Sheep stealing alone – fifteen executions – outnumbers every category of killing combined. In a colony still short on livestock and focussed on protecting settler flocks, taking someone else’s sheep carried the same weight, in the eyes of the law, as taking someone’s life. That’s the real story of 1826: not a colony purging its murderers, but the full weight of Britain’s “Bloody Code” – a legal system that still hanged people for theft – applied at maximum severity inside a penal colony.

It’s also worth noting who was doing the stealing. Forty-two of the fifty-three people executed – better than three in four – were convicts already under sentence or men who had absconded from assigned service. This was overwhelmingly Arthur disciplining his own convict system, not the colony defending itself against outside threats.

A year told in six hanging days

The executions weren’t spread evenly through the year. They fell into six distinct clusters, almost all at Hobart, each timed to a Supreme Court sitting clearing its docket:

6–7 January, Hobart (14 people). The year opened with back-to-back hanging days: six for burglary, four for sheep or cattle stealing, and three for armed robbery. Not one murder among the fourteen.

17 February, Launceston (5 people). The only cluster outside Hobart, and about as close to a single-issue hanging day as the record gets: four of the five were executed for sheep stealing, the fifth for armed robbery.

4–5 May, Hobart (11 people). This is the pair of hanging days most people remember – the one where Matthew Brady’s gang went to the gallows alongside Thomas Jeffries, an escaped convict whose crimes ran to armed robbery, murder, rape and cannibalism. They deserve to be remembered plainly for what they were: armed and dangerous escaped convicts who robbed, terrorised, and in Jeffries’ case killed, their way across the colony. Whatever romance later attached to the word used for men like them, there is nothing in the court record to support it – and tellingly, even this cluster wasn’t mostly about killing. Of the eleven, five were hanged for armed robbery and three for burglary; only two, including Jeffries, were murder convictions, with one further man hanged for arson.

13, 15 and 18 September, Hobart (23 people). By far the largest cluster – nearly half the year’s total – condensed into a single fortnight, and it splits cleanly in two. The 13th was the year’s most violent hanging day by a wide margin: five of its seven convictions were for murder or as an accessory to murder. The 15th and 18th were the opposite – sixteen people between them, every single one hanged for burglary, sheep stealing, or theft. Not one violent charge in either sitting.

Why the hangings came in batches

The clustering isn’t an accident of record-keeping — it’s how the court was built to run. On the same day as the second January hanging, 7 January 1826, the Hobart Town Gazette published a piece of correspondence that explains it directly.

Two months earlier, in November 1825, fifty Hobart Town citizens, led by Anthony Kemp, had petitioned Arthur in alarm at “the manner in which the banditti now at large have continued to evade apprehension,” blaming the delay between trial, sentence and execution for letting them keep offending. Arthur passed the complaint to Chief Justice Pedder and asked him to explain himself.

Pedder’s reply lays out, case by case, why sentencing and execution happened in batches rather than a steady trickle. The Supreme Court had to keep sitting until every prisoner on its file had been tried: “it must continue its Sittings until the gaol be delivered”, and no one was sentenced until the whole session concluded. Convention then required at least a week between sentence and execution in every capital case except murder. Add juries that wouldn’t show up before half past eleven, magistrates slow to forward depositions, and witnesses who failed to appear, and a session could drag on for months before closing all at once – at which point every condemned prisoner still waiting was sentenced together, and hanged together roughly a week later. That’s the mechanism behind 1826’s six hanging days: not six isolated decisions, but six moments when a backlogged court finally emptied its docket.

Arthur, for his part, didn’t accept the citizens’ diagnosis. His reply to the petitioners brushes past the backlog entirely and blames “a licentious Press” for encouraging the colony’s convict population toward “resistance to the constituted Authorities” – the delay in justice, he suggests, is the smaller problem.

The human cost, briefly

Where birth years survive, the condemned ranged from 18 to 73 years old, with an average age at execution of around 29. These weren’t hardened old lags exclusively – plenty were barely into adulthood.

What does this all mean?

If 1826 has a place in popular memory, it’s usually as the year Arthur’s colony was overrun with violent criminals and he hanged his way out of it. The court’s own records do not support that reading. The typical person hanged in 1826 wasn’t a killer – he was a convict who’d stolen valuables from a someone’s home, or someone else’s sheep. They were caught up in a legal system that still treated theft as a capital offence. The murderers were there, but they were the exception in that year’s execution toll, not the rule.

Note: figures, names and crime details drawn from Van Diemen’s Land Supreme Court trial records for 1826 during Governor Arthur’s administration.

Appendix: the fifty-three

Alternate spelling of names indicated in brackets. The crimes listed in the newspapers were not always accurate; the crimes in the list below are from the Supreme Court records for each person’s trial.

The post 1826: Fifty-Three Hangings, only Seven Killers appeared first on Hobart History.