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.

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“…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

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          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

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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.

          On 19 August 1830, after 108 days at sea, the convict transport David Lyon dropped anchor in the Derwent. She had left Sheerness in May with 200 male convicts aboard, drawn from the hulks Retribution and others moored at Chatham — men who had spent months, sometimes years, in the floating prisons of the Thames before ever setting foot on a ship bound for Van Diemen’s Land. The ship’s surgeon, Charles Cameron, had pronounced them in a “fair state of health” and fit for the voyage. Beyond that, the David Lyon‘s men were, on arrival, indistinguishable from any other shipload of felons landing at Hobart that year.

          Except that nine of them were not going to stay that way for long.

On 6 September 1830, less than three weeks after the David Lyon dropped anchor, the Colonial Times published Government Notice No. 173. Colonial Secretary John Burnett announced, on authority of Governor Arthur, a list of new appointments to the police of the territory. Nine names from the David Lyon: John Day, Christopher Holden, Stephen Roach, John Scholfield, Thomas Watson, William Lewis Watkins, H. Wormleighton, Dennis Andrews and Thomas Baxton, were sworn in as constables, effective the same day. A handful of other newly arrived men joined the Field Police alongside them.[1]

          Nine men, not yet a month in the colony, still presumably shaking off the stiffness of three and a half months at sea, were handed the King’s authority to arrest, restrain and give evidence against their fellow colonists. Welcome to Van Diemen’s Land: here is your truncheon, your handcuffs, your sixpence a day.

A long-standing — and unloved — solution

          The David Lyon‘s men were not an aberration. Appointing convicts as constables almost as soon as they disembarked was, by 1830, a well-worn practice in Governor Arthur’s Van Diemen’s Land (1824-1836), and one that had already earned the police force a durable and unaffectionate nickname: the Felon Police. Contemporaries were not shy about their contempt. The force was dismissed in the press as the low constabulary of this island, the worthless constabulary, a set of abominable rascals set loose to catch other rascals. One critic summed up the whole arrangement as little more than setting thieves to look after thieves.[2]

          Even the men running the system had few illusions about it. Josiah Spode[3], Superintendent of Convicts, admitted outright that the recruitment system was anything but a good one. When Governor George Arthur was questioned by the British parliament’s Molesworth Committee on Transportation in 1837, he did not pretend the practice was ideal: he defended it as the least bad option available to him. Free settlers, he explained, simply wouldn’t do the job for what the colony could afford to pay. When he had tried recruiting Chelsea out-pensioners[4] and free emigrants instead of convicts, the experiment had backfired badly: the pensioners, he told the committee, were almost invariably addicted to drunkenness, and the free emigrants were, in his memorable phrase, not particularly well selected, a low class of persons, very.[5]

          So, convicts it was. And not just any convicts: men fresh off the boat, before the colony had any real chance to observe their conduct or character.

The logic of convict against convict

          Arthur’s evidence to Molesworth reveals a specific, deliberate strategy behind the instant constable. A number of men, he said, were selected for the police out of every ship – men who knew their shipmates and had come out to the colony with them. This was not carelessness. It was calculation. Arthur wanted men who could recognise, inform on, and if necessary, betray, the very people they had spent months chained alongside on the voyage out.[6]

          In a dispatch to Lord Bathurst, Arthur was candid about what he was doing: he was deliberately setting convict against convict, using the shared knowledge and intimacy of the transport ship as an instrument of surveillance and control. Complaints that arming convicts fresh off the hulks was reckless, he insisted, had proved totally groundless. The policy, he claimed, worked precisely because it created distrust and disunion among the prisoner population. Suspicion, not solidarity, was the point.

          It’s a chilling piece of social engineering when you think about it. The very men who might, in other circumstances, have relied on one another for survival –  sharing rations, covering for escapes, keeping secrets from authority – were instead offered a shortcut out of the ordinary convict experience, on the condition that they turn their intimate knowledge of their shipmates into a weapon.

The price of the badge — and the cost of corruption

          What did an instant constable actually get for his trouble? Not much, at first. Members of the Field Police were paid a mere sixpence a day, with rations of meat and bread thrown in – a wage explicitly designed, at least in theory, to prevent them from being exposed to temptation from want.[7] The real prize on offer wasn’t the pay. It was the prospect of an early conditional pardon, particularly for men who distinguished themselves capturing bushrangers.

          But low pay and high incentive proved, unsurprisingly, a recipe for corruption rather than a cure for it. Constables were entitled to a share of any fine imposed following an arrest they’d made. This meant a constable had a direct financial stake in charging people, whether the magistrate found the person guilty or not. One case saw a constable holding a ticket-of-leave charge a fellow convict with drunkenness and happily pocket half the resulting fine. Public complaints piled up describing constables who apprehended many poor persons found in the streets after 8 o’clock, free as well as bond, purely to extort money from them – while, it was claimed, the most notorious thieves and vagabonds walked past unmolested, having greased the right palm with what one furious correspondent called the salving nature of a silver emollient.[8]

          By November 1835, organised political opposition had formed around exactly this grievance. The newly established Political Association sent Arthur a letter of protest, condemning what it called the demoralising, degrading, and dangerous practice of arming felons with the office of constable and letting them range the colony not only with arms, but without control – men drawn, in some cases, straight from penal settlements and chain gangs where they’d been sent for bad conduct in the first place.[9]

Rules on paper

          Faced with mounting public disquiet, the government issued Standing Instructions for the Constabulary in 1836, which every officer was required to carry.[10] The instructions asked constables to behave with civility to everyone, and in a line that reads almost as an admission of the problem it was trying to solve, reminded them that when questioning a suspected person, they should always bear in mind they might be speaking to an innocent one.[11]

          For constables specifically stationed in Hobart and Launceston, an additional layer of rules applied: each man was to be inspected before and after every shift to confirm he was perfectly sober, as well as cleanly and decent.[12] That such a requirement needed spelling out tells its own quiet story about the state of the force by the mid-1830s.

An unresolved irony

          Terry Newman, whose 2022 piece in the Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings first drew my attention to the David Lyon‘s nine, ends on a nicely pointed question. Shortly before Governor Franklin’s arrival in 1837, Arthur had cut off the ration allowance previously granted to the families of married constables: a saving for the colonial purse, no doubt, but one that placed extra financial strain on men whose low wages were already supposed to be the safeguard against corruption in the first place.

          Did Arthur, in tightening the budget, quietly recreate the very temptation from want his sixpence-a-day wage had been designed to prevent – even for the supposedly well-conducted convicts the system was meant to reward?

          It was, in the end, exactly what Arthur intended: a colony where the men enforcing the King’s peace and the men who’d broken it were often, for the first fortnight or so, the same men.

[1] Colonial Times, 10 September 1830

[2] True Colonist Van Diemen’s Land Political Despatch, and Agricultural and Commercial, 13 January 1835

[3] https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spode-josiah-2686

[4] Retired or invalided British Army veterans who, rather than residing at the Royal Hospital Chelsea itself (as “in-pensioners”), received their pension while living independently in the community — including, for some, after emigrating to the colonies.

[5] Stefan Petrow, “Policing in a Penal Colony: Governor Arthur’s Police System in Van Diemen’s Land, 1826–1836,” Law and History Review 18, no. 2 (2000)

[6] Report from the Select Committee on Transportation (1837), Minutes of Evidence, Arthur’s testimony

[7] Terry Newman, “Instant convict constables: a ‘set of abominable rascals’,” THRA Papers and Proceedings 69, no. 1 (2022)

[8] Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, 20 October 1826,

[9] Terry Newman, “Instant convict constables: a ‘set of abominable rascals’,” THRA Papers and Proceedings 69, no. 1 (2022):

[10] AOT POL 318/4, memo by Forster, 9 June 1836

[11] https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4174348

[12] AOT POL 318/4

The post Nine Days Off the Boat: Hobart’s Instant Constables appeared first on Hobart History.

          And yet there is a question he never asked. When convicts continued to offend — when men and women who had been punished continued with insubordination, absconding, or theft — Arthur did not ask what was driving the behaviour. He already knew the answer. Convicts offended because they were morally degraded. They would stop offending when their moral condition improved. The instrument of improvement was discipline, religious instruction, and the deterrent weight of punishment. The system’s job was to deliver these things consistently and promptly. If it was not working, the problem was insufficient rigour, not flawed assumptions.

          This was not stupidity. It was theology.

The Evangelical framework

          Arthur was a committed Evangelical Christian[1], formed in the tradition that had produced Wilberforce[2], the Clapham Sect[3], and the great moral reform movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That tradition had a fully elaborated account of human behaviour and its reform. Sin was the cause of moral failure. Repentance, discipline, and submission to the law of their Christian god were the cure. The human will, however much corrupted, was capable of reformation if placed in the right conditions and subjected to the right pressures.

          This framework was not merely personal piety. By the 1820s it had become the dominant intellectual currency of British colonial administration. The same assumptions that drove prison reform at home: the penitentiary as an instrument of moral transformation, solitary confinement as a mechanism for forcing the offender to confront their conscience, shaped thinking about what transportation ought to accomplish. Arthur had absorbed all of this. He corresponded with reformers in Britain, followed debates about prison discipline, and saw Van Diemen’s Land as, among other things, a laboratory for the reformation of character.

          The critical point is that the Evangelical framework was not designed to ask structural questions. It located the cause of crime in the individual soul, not in social or material conditions. This was not an oversight – it was a deliberate theological position. To attribute crime to poverty, homelessness, mental health, exploitation, or the conditions of the assignment system would have been to diminish individual moral responsibility, which the framework was not prepared to do.

What the structural questions would have looked like

          The data was there, had anyone been looking for it through a different lens. Arthur’s own system generated it.

          Re-offending rates remained stubbornly high even among convicts who had completed punishment and received tickets of leave. Convicts assigned to brutal or negligent masters appeared in the magistrates’ records far more often than those assigned to humane ones. Men and women who absconded were frequently fleeing specific conditions: withheld rations, violence, sexual coercion, rather than exhibiting generalised lawlessness. Theft, in many cases, was theft of food.

          A differently framed inquiry might have asked: what does it mean to require “good behaviour” from people who have no legitimate recourse when their masters behave badly? What does it mean to offer reformation to people whose material circumstances make offending rational? Why do emancipated convicts with no access to land, money, or stable employment continue to appear before the courts?

          These are not difficult questions to generate from the evidence. They simply required an observer willing to look at the convict as a person responding to circumstances, rather than a soul in need of correction. Arthur was not that observer. His system was not designed to produce one.

The impossible contract

          The assignment system placed convicts in a position that was, structurally, unresolvable. They were required to behave well; their behaviour was judged by masters who had every incentive to report misconduct and none to report good conduct; and the avenues available to convicts who were mistreated were, in practice, almost entirely closed. A convict who complained of a master’s cruelty could find the complaint dismissed and themselves charged with insubordination for making it. Absconding, insubordination, and petty theft were not simply moral failures: they were, in many cases, the only available responses to intolerable conditions.

          Arthur’s regulations could not see this, because seeing it would have required acknowledging that the assignment system was itself criminogenic. That acknowledgement was not available within the Evangelical framework, which required the convict’s moral condition – not the system’s design – to bear the weight of explanation.

A reformer who couldn’t reform the right thing

          The deeper incongruity is that Arthur’s reputation, then and now, rests substantially on his commitment to reform. He was more rigorous, more systematic, and more genuinely engaged with questions of penal purpose than almost any administrator who preceded him. His records are among the richest sources we have for understanding convict lives in this period precisely because he made it his business to know what was happening to those lives.

          But the Evangelical framework that motivated his reformism also circumscribed it. It gave him an answer before he had properly formed the question. Convicts offended because of moral degradation; moral degradation was addressed through discipline and instruction; the system’s task was to administer these consistently. The circularity was invisible from inside the framework. It would take the report of the Molesworth Committee in 1838 — arriving after Arthur’s departure — to begin articulating, haltingly, that the system itself might be the problem.

          By then, over three decades of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land had proceeded on the assumption that the question had already been answered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapham_Sect

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          Hobart Town is infested by these caterpillars on the verdure of morality, he wrote, calling for all such persons to be committed as rogues and vagabonds. In the absence of any evidence that they possessed a legal source of revenue, he argued, they should be locked up. The colony, he warned, faced increasingly fatal results if these men were allowed to prowl its public paths unmolested.[1]

          The men he was describing were emancipists: transported convicts who had served their sentences and were legally free. Free, but without money, without property, without the social networks that might have sustained them in the communities they had left behind in Britain and Ireland. The transportation system had taken years of their life and labour, and deposited them, at the end of it, onto the streets of a town with no mechanism for supporting them. Their poverty was the entirely predictable consequence of a system designed to extract labour, not to rehabilitate or resettle the people it processed.

          The editor saw none of this. What he saw was moral failure made visible. A poor man on the street was not a man in difficult circumstances: he was a veteran in the rank of infamy, a man whose very idleness was proof of his criminal nature. The logic was circular and it was deliberate: these men had no money, therefore they must be stealing, therefore they should be imprisoned. The possibility that a free man might simply be poor did not arise, because poverty was not understood as a condition requiring a social response. It was understood as a character flaw requiring punishment.

          The legal instrument the editor was reaching for had a long history before it arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. English vagrancy law, codified most recently in the Vagrancy Act of 1824, defined vagabonds as persons wandering without fixed residence, without visible means of support, or unable to give a satisfactory account of themselves to a magistrate. The law was a status offence: it required no proof of a specific criminal act, only proof of a condition. To be poor and mobile was, in itself, an offence.[2]

          In Van Diemen’s Land this imported legal framework landed in a society where it had enormous practical utility for those in authority. The convict system was built around surveillance, fixed location, and the relationship between assigned servant and master. The unattached, mobile person – the man who belonged nowhere, answered to no one, and could not account for his movements – was a direct threat to that system of control. The vagrancy charge allowed magistrates to act on suspicion rather than evidence. It allowed the propertied classes to look at a poor man and see a criminal without the inconvenience of proof.

          What made this particularly punishing in the colonial context was the complete absence of any poor relief infrastructure. In England and Wales, the poor law – however inadequate and punitive in its own right – at least provided some mechanism for supporting the destitute. Parishes were legally obliged to provide some help to the poor of their district. In Van Diemen’s Land no such obligation existed. The Hobart Town Benevolent Society, established in 1832, collapsed by 1839, and did not reconstitute itself until 1859. Even when it operated, relief was far from unconditional. The reconstituted Society based its approach on what it called a scientific method of welfare, borrowed from the Charity Organisation Society of London, which meant in practice a rigorous sorting of applicants into the deserving and undeserving poor.

          Charity Officers questioned applicants closely. A man who was willing to work in the Society’s wood yard demonstrated that his poverty was not the product of laziness – and only then might he qualify for assistance. Recipients received rations rather than money, lest they spend it on drink, and those rations were kept deliberately minimal so as not to encourage dependency. As historian Joan Brown observed, charitable institutions in Van Diemen’s Land were established not out of humanitarian concern but as a means of restricting the movement of those deemed undeserving and controlling their social interaction. The ex-convict on the street, a man whose history marked him as morally compromised before he opened his mouth, rarely passed that test.[3]

          The result was a revolving door that contemporaries noticed and complained about without ever questioning its logic. Vagabonds arrested in the rural districts surrounding Launceston were conveyed to the Launceston city gaol at considerable expense, held briefly, and released onto Launceston streets — where they promptly became Launceston’s problem rather than the district’s. The ratepayers of Launceston were aggrieved. Nobody asked why these men had been vagabonding in the first place.

          The government’s own response followed a similar logic. Governor Arthur had established the rudiments of a welfare system in the late 1820s and early 1830s, but it grew directly out of the convict system and retained its character — institutional, controlling, and punitive. The aged, the infirm, and the mentally ill were confined rather than supported. Port Arthur served for a time as an invalid depot. The New Norfolk asylum absorbed those who could be classified as insane, along with many who simply had nowhere else to go. The Poor Asylum in Hobart caught those who fitted no other category. Each institution operated on a principle stated with remarkable candour in the 1871 Royal Commission into Charitable Institutions.

The Commission declared that it would oppose any attempt to make institutions for the poor more comfortable than the home an honest, hardworking man could hope to earn for himself in old age through temperance and thrift. Public charity, it continued, should not be a benefit so much as a slight softening of the consequences of a person’s own failure to live by decent principles.[4]

          According to the reasoning of the members of this Royal Commission, poverty was not misfortune. It was the consequence of personal failure, and charity existed not to relieve poverty but to slightly soften the punishment the poor had earned. The institutions existed to confirm that verdict, not to challenge it.

          The people who did not fit any institutional category – not old enough, not sick enough, not certifiably insane – remained on the street, where they could be arrested as a vagabond, briefly confined, and released to begin the cycle again. The Launceston ratepayers who complained about this arrangement were not wrong about the mechanics of it. They were simply asking the wrong question. The problem was not where these people were being released. The problem was that a society which had transported them, worked them, and freed them with nothing had then built a legal and institutional apparatus specifically designed to punish them for being poor.

          Two hundred years later, Tasmania has a welfare state, however imperfect, that the emancipists of 1825 could not have imagined. And yet in 2021, 2,350 people in Tasmania were homeless: a figure that had risen 45% since 2016. More than 120,000 Tasmanians live below the poverty line. One in every 81 Tasmanians sought homelessness assistance in 2021–22, a higher rate than the national average. On any given day, 42 requests for help go unmet.[5]

          The structural explanation for this is not difficult to find. The chronic shortage of affordable rental housing in Tasmania is the primary driver of homelessness: an economic condition, not a moral failing. Housing costs have risen faster than incomes. The supply of social housing has not kept pace with need. These are facts about markets and policy, not about the character of the people sleeping in cars or on friends’ couches or in crisis shelters.

          And yet the instinct to moralise poverty – to locate its cause in the individual rather than in the conditions that produce it – has proved extraordinarily durable. The language has changed. Nobody writes about caterpillars on the verdure of morality any more, or calls for vagabonds to be committed lest they revert to their second nature. But the permission structure that language created, the licence to look at a visibly poor person and see a problem of social order rather than a fellow human in difficulty, remains active. It surfaces whenever a council or parliament debates move-on powers for rough sleepers, whenever a letter to the editor complains about people begging in the mall, whenever a state or federal politician finds an identifiable group to blame for the anxieties of people who feel the economy is leaving them behind.

          The editor of the Hobart Town Gazette was not writing about a problem unique to 1825. He was road-testing an argument that has never really gone out of fashion.

[1] Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 25 March 1825

[2] 5 George IV C.83: An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.

[3] https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/entity/hobart-benevolent-society

[4] Report of the Royal Commission into Charitable Institutions, Legislative Council of Tasmania, 1871

[5] https://sheltertas.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ST_FACT-SHEET_Homelessness-March2023-1.pdf

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In the 1830s, Hobart was one of the busiest whaling ports in the world. Whale oil lit its streets. The sandstone warehouses lining Salamanca Place, still standing, were built specifically to store whaling products, and by 1830 the new deeper dock was bustling with whaling ships, sailors, traders – and some say smugglers. The City of Hobart’s coat of arms carries a whaling ship as its crest: the Flying Childers, built at Battery Point in 1846, in recognition of the industry’s importance to the town’s identity and economy.

Van Diemen’s Land made more money from whale exports than from any other product during that decade. What is less often remarked upon is who was doing the dangerous work.

Whaling was not a genteel occupation. Shore-based stations required men to row out to meet southern right whales in small open boats, drive a harpoon into the animal at close range, and then hold on while the line ran out. When the whale tired, the crew closed in to lance it. A harpooned whale that turned on a boat could capsize it instantly. Lines running out at speed could take a man’s hand or drag him overboard. Flensing, stripping the blubber from a dead whale alongside the boat or at the station, involved sharp implements, heavy labour, and rendered fat that made every surface treacherous. At its peak in 1849, Hobart had 34 locally owned and operated whaling vessels. The industry employed hundreds of men.

The founding moment of Tasmanian whaling is itself instructive. In December 1815, Captain James Kelly, later acclaimed as the father and founder of whaling in Tasmania, set out from Hobart to circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land in an open whaleboat. Most sources today will simply state that it was Kelly and ‘four convicts’ but there is never a reference or any names. The only confirmation of names available so far is from Kelly’s journal, held by the Royal Society of Tasmania. It states: On 12th December 1815 James Kelly sailed from Hobart Town in a small sized open five oared whaleboat to examine the then unknown West Coast of Van D. Land accompanied the following named four men as crew: John Griffith, a native of the Colony, George Briggs. ditto. William Jones, English man, Thomas Toombs, ditto

Nothing so far to confirm whether Jones and Tombs were serving or former convicts, but a bit of digging into the convict records shows that both arrived in the NSW colony on the convict transport Calcutta in 1803, and by 1815 were in the Hobart colony.

Jones appears to have been working in maritime trades in the intervening years. Tombs had a more eventful intervening decade: he had absconded into the bush, lived for a period on emu and kangaroo far from any settlement, and in 1812 petitioned for mitigation of his sentence by hunting down two armed bushrangers, having tracked them across forty miles of country and securing them with kangaroo cord and conducting them into town. He received a conditional pardon in January 1813, which meant he remained legally constrained and could not leave the colony. Two years later he was in Kelly’s whaleboat, heading into the unknown southwest coast.

Tombs is not a figure who fits easily into the category of passive victim of his circumstances. He was someone navigating the convict system with considerable resourcefulness: a man who had survived the bush as an absconder, outwitted two armed men, and earned his partial freedom through nerve. But navigating the system is not the same as being free of it. His options remained constrained, his liberty revocable, his future contingent on the continued approval of the colonial authorities. When dangerous work was offered, dangerous work was what you took.

That is the point. The whaling industry did not draw its labour from somewhere outside the convict system – it drew from exactly the pool the system had created: transported men with maritime skills, men hardened by years of colonial labour, men whose circumstances left them little room to decline.

Kelly’s name lives on in the famous steps linking Salamanca Place to Battery Point.

Less remembered is what those steps connected: the world of maritime commerce above, and the convict-built warehouses below, in a colony where the line between free enterprise and forced labour was, for decades, largely invisible.

The colonial authorities understood perfectly well how close that world was to the convict population — and their response tells you a great deal about what they were, and were not, concerned about.

The first application to establish a shore-based whaling station in the Derwent was approved in 1805. Within a year, Lieutenant Governor Collins had issued general orders specifically aimed at controlling movement between the whaling station, the settlement, and vessels anchored in the river. No person in charge of a boat was to land at any place where the business of the fishery was being carried on, or communicate with any ships employed in the river, without written authority. The coxswains of government boats were prohibited from even hailing people employed in the whaling industry. Under additional regulations, all ships using the port were to be searched before leaving, and small craft were ordered to take down and pack away their sails and rudders upon docking: for fear of seizure by absconding convicts.

The Port Dalrymple regulations were equally explicit: masters of ships faced a penalty of £200 if they took any person from the colony without written permission, and were required to deliver any convict discovered on board after sailing to the commanding officer at the first port of call. No convict, male or female, was to be received on board any vessel in the harbour without a pass from the Lieutenant Governor or a magistrate. No boats were to remain on shore after 8pm.

These were not minor administrative measures. The concern about escape was substantial enough to directly slow the whaling industry’s development. Bay whaling did not become common in the Derwent until 1819, over a decade after the first station was approved, partly because of the difficulties in controlling the harbour to prevent convicts absconding on fishing and whaling vessels.

The colonial state was alert to precisely one risk at the intersection of convicts and whaling: the risk that convicts might escape. That risk generated governor-level regulation from the industry’s first year. The risk that convicts might be injured or killed doing the work generated nothing at all.

The assignment system that governed convict labour in Van Diemen’s Land was a transaction between the colonial government and private employers. Masters received workers at almost no cost. In return, they were required to provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. The convict worked. The master profited, or didn’t, and bore the cost of maintenance either way.

What the assignment system did not provide was any mechanism by which a convict could refuse dangerous work, or seek redress if injured doing it. A master could return an unsatisfactory convict to the authorities. A convict could not leave an unsatisfactory master. Refusal to work was a punishable offence. The labour was coerced by definition, and the terms were set entirely by the other party.

This was not an oversight. It was the point. Transportation was intended to be punitive, and one of its punishments was the loss of agency over one’s own labour. The system was, as abolitionists of the 1830s noted, a giant lottery: a well-behaved convict assigned to a brutal or reckless master had no recourse. The Molesworth Committee, reporting to the British Parliament in 1838 on the state of transportation, described the assignment system as producing outcomes indistinguishable from slavery: not primarily because of the violence it permitted, but because of the structural powerlessness it imposed.

The question of who paid when an assigned convict was injured at work has a specific and revealing answer. Originally, masters were entitled to send sick or injured convict servants to the colonial hospital at government expense. By the late 1820s, precisely as the whaling industry was reaching its peak, this had changed. Masters were now expected to meet the cost of their servants’ hospital treatment. At the government hospital in Hobart, the fee structure was explicit: treatment was free for convicts on government labour; convicts assigned to private employers were charged between one and three shillings.

This is financially trivial. One to three shillings was not a meaningful deterrent to anyone running a profitable whaling operation. But the fee structure does clarify one thing: the colonial government understood the distinction between its own workers and those it had transferred to private employers, and it had decided that the cost of an injured assigned convict fell on the person profiting from their labour.

What it did not decide, what no one at the time appears to have thought to decide, was whether there were categories of work too dangerous for assigned convicts to be directed into. There was no equivalent of even the earliest British factory legislation. The Factory Act of 1833, which applied only to textile mills and regulated only the hours worked by children, was the most advanced workplace protection law in the English-speaking world at the time. It did not reach the colonies, and even if it had, it would not have covered maritime labour.

The concept of an employer’s duty to provide a safe system of work did not exist in law. The laws regarding negligence, which eventually gave workers a legal basis to claim against employers for foreseeable harm, was not established until 1932. A convict maimed on a whaling boat in 1835 had no claim, no appeal, and no compensation beyond whatever medical treatment his master was obliged to provide.

There is an irony in the record that is worth sitting with.

The colonial government did have a formal medical oversight role for one category of harm to convicts: flogging. When a convict was flogged, a surgeon was required to be present: not to prevent the punishment, but to supervise it, to ensure that the lash did not go so far as to kill or permanently disable. There were recorded instances of floggings being halted on medical grounds, and restarted once the convict had recovered sufficiently to receive the remainder.

This oversight existed because the punishment was the government’s business. The state was inflicting harm, and it had an institutional interest in administering that harm correctly: within limits, according to procedure, with someone present to verify that the machinery of punishment was functioning as intended.

No equivalent procedure existed for workplace injuries. No surgeon attended when a convict crewed a whaleboat. No official verified that the work was proportionate to the risk. No record was required when a man was hurt. The state’s medical attention followed its penal authority, and stopped precisely where private enterprise began.

The state was, in short, more institutionally attentive to the harm it deliberately inflicted than to the harm it permitted others to inflict by accident. And it was more concerned about a convict escaping on a whaleboat than about a convict being killed on one.

Whether convicts were routinely assigned to whaling ships specifically, as opposed to shore-based processing work, remains uncertain. What is clear is that convicts constituted more than half the available labour force in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s, and that whaling entrepreneurs drew from the same pool of assigned labour as every other employer in the colony. The composition of Kelly’s 1815 crew offers one documented example of how that worked in practice: transported men, working a dangerous coast, their choices shaped by a system that had followed them across the world.

What is not uncertain is the framework within which any such labour occurred. A convict sent to work on a whaling boat had no right to refuse, no protection against the specific hazards of the work, no compensation if injured, and no recourse if the master’s negligence contributed to the harm. His sentence continued regardless. The master’s cost, if he needed hospital treatment, was a shilling or two.

Hobart was built on a whale’s back, as the saying goes. It was also built on a convict’s back. The two facts were not unrelated, and the intersection between them, the question of what the colonial state owed the people it transported and then lent out to dangerous industries, was a question that nobody in authority appears to have thought worth asking.

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