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.

The post Built on a Whale’s Back: Convict Labour, Dangerous Work, and the Limits of Care appeared first on Hobart History.

There is a persistent story told about colonial Tasmania: that British settlers came to Van Diemen’s Land and received free land. It appears in family histories, genealogical databases, and popular accounts of the colonial period. It is, at best, a half-truth. At worst, it obscures a system carefully designed to serve the interests of capital over labour, the powerful over the ordinary, and the Crown over everyone.

The land was never simply free. What was offered was something considerably more conditional, more calculated, and more revealing of how the colonial project actually worked.

The Grant System: Generous in Appearance

From the earliest years of European settlement in Van Diemen’s Land – formally established as a separate colony in 1825, though settled from 1803 – the British Government authorised governors to make land grants to free settlers. The broad outlines of this policy were in place from Governor Sorell’s time and continued until 1831. On the surface it looks simple: come to the colony, apply for land, receive it at no cost.

The reality was more complicated from the start.

Grants were not available to anyone who asked. Applicants had to demonstrate capital: money, livestock, farming implements, even a government pension counted, and the size of the grant was scaled to the capital declared. The 1828 regulations published in the Colonial Times set the formula explicitly: 640 acres for every £500 of capital, up to a maximum of 2,560 acres without purchase. A settler arriving with £2,000 in declared assets could expect around 2,560 acres; one with £500 received 640. The Land Board investigated each application, and the regulations were explicit that grants should not be made to persons “desirous only of disposing of them.”

This capital-scaling had a straightforward logic from the colonial administration’s perspective: unimproved land was useless to the colony. They wanted productive farms and pastoral runs, not speculators sitting on idle acres. But it also meant, from the beginning, that the grant system overwhelmingly favoured those who already had means.

The Conditions Attached

Even when land was granted, it came with strings.

Grantees were required to improve the land: specifically, to invest capital equal to at least one-quarter of the land’s assessed value in cultivation and development. Fail to do so, and the grant could be revoked. This was not a trivial requirement: it meant a new settler had to spend money on their grant before they had generated any income from it.

Grants also required a quit rent: an annual payment to the Crown acknowledging that ultimate ownership remained with the Crown rather than the recipient. The 1828 regulations set this at 5% per annum on the estimated value of the grant, deferred for the first seven years. This was not trivial on paper: a grant valued at £500 would attract £25 per year once the grace period expired. Grantees could redeem the quit rent entirely by paying twenty years’ worth in a lump sum, but those who neither paid nor redeemed remained legally liable. They were a perpetual reminder that what looked like ownership was in fact conditional tenure.

Most significantly, and most commonly overlooked in popular accounts, settlers who received grants were obliged to take on assigned convicts. The colony’s labour force consisted largely of transported convicts assigned to free settlers, who were responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing them. The “free” land therefore came bundled with an obligation to maintain a workforce at the settler’s own expense. The land was one side of a transaction; convict labour was the other.

As one observer noted in the House of Lords in 1846, it was in fact to the convicts that the prosperity of the settlers was largely owing: and those settlers had been bound, as a condition of their grants, to receive and maintain them.

The Conditions on Paper and the Conditions in Practice

Here is where the mythology becomes genuinely interesting: because the conditions attached to grants were not merely imperfect. They were, for the settler class as a whole, almost entirely unenforced.

The improvement obligation, the quit rent, the prohibition on selling land within five years of grant: all of these existed in law and were ignored in practice with near-total impunity. Settler William Barnes wrote to his brother in 1824 that it was understood you had to cultivate or stock your farm within five years, “but I believe this regulation is never enforced.” He was right. Barnes himself estimated he could sell his 1,000-acre grant for £800 in the same year he received it: a tidy capital gain on land he had done nothing with.

Barnes was far from alone. Hamilton Wallace wrote to his father in 1825 that he had been entitled to 500 acres but had “managed to get 1,280” — for which he was “repeatedly offered £700.” William Williamson, who told his sister he sought to “do my duty to all as a truly honest man,” simultaneously boasted of having given in “a fictitious capital” to secure his expected 1,000 acres. These are not isolated cases of individual dishonesty. They are evidence of a system in which misrepresentation was standard practice.

Governor Arthur recognised as much. He wrote to London in 1828 that “the schedule of property which settlers exhibit on their arrival in order to gain land is faithless to a proverb.” The historian L.L. Robson estimated later that probably half of all land granted in Van Diemen’s Land to 1830 had been obtained by evasion of the law.

Even quit rents, substantial on paper, went largely uncollected. When Arthur finally attempted to enforce payment in 1831, the solicitor-general advised him that any attempt to resume land for non-payment would be defeated by a jury. Since juries comprised other free settlers – men who had obtained their own grants on similar terms – no resumption was ever pursued. No land was ever taken back. The conditions proved unenforceable in practice, and by the time anyone seriously tried to enforce them, the land was already gone.

The scale of what happened in the 1820s is staggering in retrospect. From 1804 to 1822, a period of nearly two decades, only 132,550 acres had been granted in Van Diemen’s Land. In the eight years from 1823 to 1831, a further 1,899,332 acres were given away, almost all the profitable land in the colony, gone in less than a decade. By the time the Ripon Regulations came into effect in June 1831, there was very little good land left to sell.

Arthur ensured that. In the first half of 1831 alone, as the free grant system drew to a close, he handed over nearly 250,000 acres to new and existing settlers, including the long-coveted 100,000-acre grazing reserve near Ross, described at the time as “the finest tract of land in the island.” The beneficiaries were, predictably, members of the colonial elite.

The Privatisation of Crown Land: Who Really Benefited

The grant system as experienced by individual settlers, however imperfect, was a different creature from the deals struck at the top end of the colonial economy.

The Van Diemen’s Land Company, established by Royal Charter in 1825, secured over 400,000 acres, eventually settling at around 350,000 acres spread across the north-west, for a quit rent of £468 per year. That is not a misprint. Nearly half a million acres of Tasmanian land, some of the most substantial pastoral country available, transferred to a private company for less than the annual wage of a skilled tradesman. The Australian Agricultural Company in New South Wales received 500,000 acres outright, including coal mines at Newcastle, for nothing at all.

When critics of the land grant system complained that large grants had been the ruin of the colonies, they had a point – though not quite the one they meant. The problem was not generosity to settlers generally. It was the extraordinary concentration of land in the hands of companies and well-connected individuals who had the political leverage to obtain Royal Charters and governors’ favour. Individual settlers navigating the Land Board faced scrutiny and conditions. Chartered companies did not.

Governor Arthur, who dominated Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836, was particularly active in distributing land to members of his preferred social class. The pastoral elite that would shape Tasmanian economic and political life for generations was substantially assembled during his watch.

1831: The System Changes — and Why

In 1831 the entire framework changed. Lord Ripon, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, issued regulations ending land grants entirely. From that point, Crown land in the Australian colonies was to be sold at public auction, with a minimum price per acre to be set by government.

This was not a random policy shift. It was directly influenced by the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose theory of “systematic colonisation” had been gaining traction in London. Wakefield had identified what he saw as a fundamental problem with colonial land policy: land was too accessible. If labourers could acquire their own land too easily, they stopped being available as a workforce for established landholders.

His solution, which the Goderich/Ripon regulations effectively implemented,  was to set land prices deliberately high. High enough that a working man would have to labour for wages for years before accumulating sufficient capital to buy land of his own. The proceeds from land sales would then fund the immigration of new labourers to replace those who eventually graduated to landowner status.

Wakefield was perfectly candid about the intent. This was not an accidental feature of colonial land pricing: it was the explicit purpose. Keep land expensive; keep labour available; keep the social order intact.

What the Mythology Conceals

The “free land” narrative is not entirely without foundation. In the period before 1831, grants were made without direct cash payment, and for settlers of sufficient means the system did offer genuine opportunity. Many families who came to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s did establish themselves on granted land and built substantial properties.

But the mythology strips out the conditions, the capital requirements, the convict obligations, the quit rents, and the improvement covenants. It strips out the enormous disparity between what ordinary settlers received and what chartered companies and political favourites obtained. And it strips out the deliberate restructuring of 1831, which replaced imperfect generosity with a system explicitly designed to keep the majority of people working for someone else.

The colonial land system in Van Diemen’s Land was not a gift. It was a transaction, and like most transactions in colonial society, the terms depended heavily on who you were and who you knew.

Sources:

Colonial Times (Hobart), 18 January 1828 (land grant terms)
Hansard, House of Lords, 3 March 1846
R.M. Hartwell, The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land 1820–1850 (1954)
Stephen Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788–1920
James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (2008).

The post The Land Was Never Free:  Myth and Reality of Van Diemen’s Land Grants appeared first on Hobart History.

In 1803, the British established a settlement on the Derwent River as part of a wider imperial design: securing territory, countering French expansion, and deploying a convict workforce to lay the economic foundations of a new colony. Neither purpose left much room for the emergence of a prosperous middling class. Yet by the time Van Diemen’s Land became Tasmania in 1856, a recognisable middle class had taken shape – tentatively, unevenly, and in ways that bore the peculiar stamp of the colony’s origins.

A Colony Without a Middle

The social structure of early Hobart was stark – and very different to that of the same period in England. At the top sat a small elite: military officers, senior colonial officials, and once free settlement was actively encouraged from the early 1820s, gentlemen farmers who arrived with capital and the expectation of land grants and affordable convict labour. At the bottom was everyone else, the majority of whom were convicts, ex-convicts, or the children of convicts.

What the colony lacked, almost by design, was the middle. The Bigge Report of 1822 had pushed colonial policy firmly toward pastoral capitalism, concentrating convict labour in the hands of large landowners. This left limited space for the small traders, skilled artisans, and independent professionals who constituted the backbone of the middle class back in Britain. In 1824, of a population of just under 12,000, nearly half were convicts. The social arithmetic did not favour a middling sort.[1]

The exclusives were free settlers who jealously guarded their distance from the convict taint, had little interest in a middle ground. Emancipists who had served their time were, in their view, simply ex-convicts rather than respectable citizens. The boundary that mattered most in early VDL was not between rich and poor but between free and unfree, tainted and untainted.

The Seedbed: Merchants, Tradesmen, and Professions

Yet the middle class was quietly assembling itself in the colony’s interstices. Merchants were among the first to stake out middling ground. By the 1820s and 1830s, Hobart’s waterfront commerce had generated a class of traders who were neither the landed gentry nor the labouring poor. They sold goods, extended credit, freighted wool and whale oil, and accumulated modest capital. The 1824 petition for VDL’s separation from New South Wales, signed by a hundred colonists describing themselves as “landholders, merchants and other free inhabitants,” signals that this commercial class already understood itself as a distinct interest.[2]

Alongside the merchants came the professionals: lawyers, doctors, and clergymen whose occupations placed them in a peculiar social position. They were educated men, often from respectable English backgrounds, who had come to the colony not as convicts or wealthy pastoralists but as practitioners of callings that conferred status regardless of capital. Chief Justice Pedder’s court, established in 1824, required barristers. The sick required doctors. The dead required burial and the living required churches. The professions expanded steadily as the population grew, each new practitioner adding a small brick to the middle-class edifice.

The free immigrant tradesman: the carpenter, baker, printer, or publican who arrived under their own steam, occupied the lower reaches of this emerging formation. Their respectability was harder won and more precarious, but it was real. A skilled tradesman who had never worn irons occupied a different world from the convict assigned to work beside him, and knew it.

The Arthur Years and After

Governor George Arthur’s long administration (1824–1836) shaped the class structure in ways that would outlast him. His system of convict assignment was economically efficient but socially corrosive: it gave large landowners a captive workforce and concentrated wealth at the top. The 1840s economic depression[3] temporarily flattened the colony’s prospects. Credit collapsed, small businesses failed, and the middling classes who had accumulated a little found it precarious.

Transportation to VDL ended in 1853.[4] This was the structural event the emerging middle class had been waiting for, even if many of them had lobbied against it on the grounds that cheap convict labour underpinned the economy. The end of transportation meant the end of the convict/free binary that had structured colonial society from the start. It did not immediately create a middle class, but it removed the main obstacle to one.

Respectability and the Renaming

The name change from Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania in 1856 was, among other things, a middle-class project. The free settler elite had long chafed at the association of the colony’s name with bondage and crime; the renaming was a public signal that the island intended to be something different: respectable, prosperous, self-governing. Responsible government arrived in the same year.

The timing was not coincidental. A middle class requires institutions: a free press, voluntary associations, churches, schools, mechanics’ institutes, and these had been accumulating quietly through the 1840s and 1850s. The mechanics’ institute is worth pausing on: founded ostensibly to improve the minds of working tradesmen, these institutions were quickly claimed by the middling classes. The working men they were nominally intended for often couldn’t afford the subscription fees or found the lectures too academic; what emerged instead were reading rooms, libraries, and lecture halls patronised by lawyers, doctors, merchants, and clergymen.

The first mechanics’ institute in the Australian colonies opened in Hobart in 1827[5], a telling early marker of middle-class ambition in a colony still numerically dominated by convicts. The founding meeting, held at the British Hotel on Liverpool Street in March 1827, on the site now occupied by the Cat and Fiddle Arcade, drew upwards of 130 people.[6] The resolutions were moved not by working tradesmen but by magistrates, lawyers, and gentlemen of property. The working class had lost control of their own institution before the first lecture was delivered.

The Hobart institute eventually collapsed in 1871, never having shaken its reputation as a gentlemen’s lounge rather than a school for working men; its Launceston counterpart fared better, surviving to become the city’s public library: a contrast that reflects something real about the two cities’ different civic cultures.

By 1856, Hobart and Launceston had newspapers, professional societies, churches of multiple denominations, and a modest but genuine cultural life. These were the institutional infrastructure of bourgeois respectability, transplanted from Britain and slowly taking root.

The Difficult Decades

The 1850s and 1860s brought an unexpected setback. When gold was discovered in Victoria in 1851, around 45,000 people across the decade of the 1850s left Tasmania, many of them precisely the ambitious, mobile, younger members of the middling classes who had the most to gain from the rush. The colony that had been building toward respectability found itself suddenly depleted.

The economic consequences compounded the demographic ones. By the mid-1860s, Tasmania’s export trade had largely collapsed[7], overseas investment had dried up, and wages were falling. The Companion to Tasmanian History’s account of the economy in this period reads almost like a list of misfortunes: timber, whale oil, and wheat markets gone; Victorian tariff barriers up; British capital withdrawn. The middle class that had been forming over 30 years rapidly contracted within ten, and the sleepy image Tasmania acquired in this period had real material foundations.

Consolidation and Federation

Recovery came slowly, driven by mineral discoveries: Mount Bischoff tin from the 1870s, the Queenstown copper and silver-lead mines from the 1880s and 1890s. These industries generated not only wealth but the professional and managerial class that extractive industries require: engineers, surveyors, company secretaries, accountants. The mining towns of the west coast were rough places, but they fed money into Hobart and Launceston where it supported the lawyers, doctors, merchants, and teachers who embodied middling respectability.

By the 1880s and 1890s, Tasmania’s middle class had consolidated sufficiently to display its characteristic anxieties and aspirations. Suburbs were expanding. Voluntary associations: temperance societies, reading clubs and horticultural societies, multiplied. The professions had organised themselves: the legal profession, the medical profession, the clergy all had their hierarchies and their claims to public standing. And the middle class had begun the work of selective memory that would define Tasmanian public culture: emphasising the free settler heritage, downplaying the convict majority, and constructing a respectable past to match its respectable present.

When Federation arrived in 1901, Tasmania joined as the smallest and poorest of the founding colonies, but a recognisably modern one. The middle class that assembled around the polling booths to vote on federation: the doctors, solicitors, shopkeepers and schoolteachers, had emerged from a colonial social structure uniquely inhospitable to their existence. That they existed at all was, in its modest way, a considerable achievement.

[1] ABS – The Development of Official Statistics in Tasmania.
[2] Founding Docs: Order-in-Council separating Van Diemen’s Land from New South Wales 14 June 1825 (UK)
[3] The VDL economy of the 1840s was built on wool, wheat, and timber exports underpinned by cheap convict labour, and all three props gave way at once: commodity prices fell, the British credit that had fuelled pastoral expansion dried up, and the introduction of the probation system in 1839 replaced the relatively efficient assignment system with something far more costly and less productive. The result was a decade of bank failures, business collapses, and falling wages that hit the small commercial and professional class – the embryonic middle class – particularly hard.
[4] British public opinion had turned decisively against transportation, driven partly by humanitarian reformers and partly by the free settler population of VDL itself, who had been agitating loudly since the late 1840s through the Australasian Anti-Transportation League. The Colonial Office in London, facing sustained pressure and recognising that the assignment system, the economic justification for the whole enterprise, had already been dismantled, agreed to cease sending convicts to VDL, with the last convict ship arriving in 1853.
[5] Companion to Tasmanian History – Mechanic’s Institute 
[6] The chaos of the June 1827 election meeting, abandoned on the first evening due to disputes, reconvened the next day. The committee expanded from 12 to 20, mechanics’ representation reduced from two thirds to one half and officers were elected by show of hands in defiance of the rules: all this set the pattern for the institute’s entire existence.
[7] The gold rush exodus had stripped Tasmania of population and labour just as global commodity markets turned against the colony: by 1865, Tasmania’s export trade in timber, whale oil and wheat had collapsed, wheat and wool production had fallen dramatically, and a year later Tasmania’s most important market – Victoria – adopted a protective trade policy, raising tariff barriers to colonial trade.

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Marcus Clarke was confident. In the preface to For the Term of His Natural Life, he addressed his readers directly: “I do not think, however, that you will discover any exaggerations.”

That sentence has been quietly doing damage ever since.

More than 150 years after its serialisation in The Australian Journal, Clarke’s novel remains the dominant lens through which many Australians understand the convict experience. It has been adapted for film and television. It is taught in schools. It sits on the shelves of people who would never describe themselves as history readers, but who will tell you, with some confidence, what life was like for convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. The problem is that what they know is largely fiction: and not always fiction grounded in careful research.

I’ve spent years working with the primary sources of the convict period: records of the Supreme Court and Magistrates’ Courts, conduct registers, minutes of the Executive Council, newspaper archives, the remarkably intact collections held at the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. I’m currently completing Speaker for the Dead, a history of capital punishment in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania. That work has taken me deep into the documentary record of what actually happened to convicts who fell foul of the system: the worst cases, the most serious offenders, the people for whom things went as badly as they possibly could. And even at that extreme end of the spectrum, the picture looks nothing like Rufus Dawes.

So let’s talk about the exaggerations Clarke was so sure didn’t exist.

The Research Problem

Clarke visited Tasmania once, briefly, in 1870. He was sent by his employers to research a series of newspaper pieces on the convict era. Shortly afterwards, His Natural Life began its serialisation, which means he was writing a novel about Van Diemen’s Land while simultaneously editing the journal that published it, on a deadline, based on a short research trip and whatever documentary sources he could access in Melbourne. The novel was, in short, written on the run.

This matters. Clarke was an accomplished writer with real literary ambitions, but he was not an historian. He visited Port Arthur once. He did not have access to the systematic analysis of conduct records that later scholars would undertake. What he had was dramatic instinct, a taste for Gothic atmosphere, and a polemical purpose: he wanted to condemn the transportation system. Those are excellent qualities in a novelist. They are not a substitute for archival research.

One Man, Every Horror

The structural problem with reading For the Term of His Natural Life as history is what we might call the aggregation problem. Clarke took the worst documented incidents from the entire transportation period, across multiple decades, multiple locations, multiple penal stations, and threaded them into the life of a single man.

Rufus Dawes experiences Macquarie Harbour. He experiences Norfolk Island. He experiences Port Arthur. He survives a shipwreck. He witnesses cannibalism. He is flogged, and does the flogging, repeatedly, comprehensively, throughout. He encounters almost every horror that the transportation system produced at its most extreme, in sequence, as a single continuous biography.

No actual convict experienced anything like this. The dramatic logic of the novel required the accumulation of suffering. The historical record does not support it. What Clarke created was not a representative convict life but a kind of greatest-hits compilation of colonial brutality: vivid, morally serious, and profoundly misleading as a guide to what transportation typically meant.

The Flogging Question

Clarke’s novel is saturated with the lash. Flogging is the system’s primary instrument of control, its default response to any infraction, the background noise of convict existence. This is the image that has lodged in the Australian imagination: the convict back, the cat-o’-nine-tails, the magistrate with his quota of stripes.

The historical record tells a more complicated story.

The landmark work Convict Workers (1988), edited by Stephen Nicholas, drew on systematic analysis of convict records to reach a conclusion that surprised many readers: while cruel treatment certainly existed, the likelihood of a convict receiving numerous floggings across their sentence was, in Nicholas’s own word, a myth. The majority of convicts, most of the time, were not being flogged.

More specifically, data from New South Wales in 1833, one of the harder periods of the system, shows that around one in five convicts received a flogging sentence in that year. That is not a trivial number. But it also means four in five did not, in a year that historians consider relatively punitive. Clarke’s novel implies something closer to the reverse.

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s meticulous work on VDL conduct records adds further nuance. The rate of flogging in Van Diemen’s Land was already declining well before the Molesworth Committee of 1837, which is conventionally credited with reforming the system.

 
George Washington Walker and James Backhouse: 1832 – 1837 they did the leg work for the Molseworth report of the penal settlements in Australia, Van Diemen’s Land, and Norfolk Island

And the reason it declined tells us something important about how the system actually operated: flogging was being replaced not by enlightenment but by solitary confinement, which administrators found more effective as a control mechanism and which, unlike flogging, has been shown to have actually shortened convict life expectancy. The punishment Clarke dramatises so vividly was, in practice, giving way to a quieter and more insidious form of suffering that doesn’t make for nearly as gripping a novel.

Maxwell-Stewart’s research also shows that punishment rates in VDL varied significantly with labour market conditions. Convicts with skills that were in colonial demand were less likely to be punished than unskilled shipmates. The system was calibrated, at least partly, by economic logic. This is not the portrait Clarke paints. His system is driven by sadism, personal cruelty, and the moral failures of individual administrators: Frere being the prime exhibit. The historical system was driven by something colder and in some ways more disturbing: rational exploitation.

My own work with TAHO conduct records bears this out. The convicts whose cases I’ve examined most closely are those who were ultimately executed: people for whom the system failed most catastrophically. Even in those records, the picture is not one of unrelenting flogging from arrival to death. The lash appears, certainly. But it appears alongside a much wider range of punishments, inducements, and administrative calculations. The conduct record is a ledger of a system managing a workforce, not a chronicle of sadism.

How Clarke Manufactured Authority

The flogging statistics are one problem. But there is a deeper issue with Clarke’s method, visible in passages like this one, which appears in the novel as apparent historical observation:

Of the social condition of these people at this time it is impossible to speak without astonishment. According to the recorded testimony of many respectable persons – Government officials, military officers, and free settlers – the profligacy of the settlers was notorious. Drunkenness was a prevailing vice. Even children were to be seen in the streets intoxicated… As for the condition of the prisoner population, that, indeed, is indescribable… a bottle of brandy was considered to be cheaply bought at the price of twenty lashes… All that the vilest and most bestial of human creatures could invent and practise, was in this unhappy country invented and practised without restraint and without shame.
quote from Chapter III – A Social Evening, from For the term of his natural life.

Read it carefully, and the apparatus of historical authority dissolves on inspection.

“According to the recorded testimony of many respectable persons” – no names, no documents, no citations. The phrase “respectable persons” is doing enormous work here, invoking authority without providing any. And notice who is conspicuously absent from Clarke’s list of witnesses: convicts themselves. The entire portrait of convict depravity is drawn from the testimony of their gaolers and social superiors.

“A bottle of brandy was considered to be cheaply bought at the price of twenty lashes” – presented as established fact, but the kind of vivid anecdote that circulated freely in colonial moral panic literature, untethered from any reliable source. It also, incidentally, undermines Clarke’s own flogging narrative: if convicts were voluntarily trading twenty lashes for a drink, the lash was clearly not the annihilating terror he depicts elsewhere in the novel.

“Of too horrible a nature to be more than hinted at here” — a well-worn Victorian-era rhetorical device. The strategic non-description conjures worse horrors in the reader’s imagination than any actual description could, while conveniently requiring no evidence whatsoever.

The paragraph moves from vague attribution to unnamed witnesses to unverifiable anecdote to deliberate vagueness, and arrives at a sweeping conclusion: “all that the vilest and most bestial of human creatures could invent and practise” – that is pure polemic dressed as history. This is not a method that would survive contact with an ethics committee, let alone a peer reviewer.

Clarke was writing Gothic moral outrage, not history. The problem is that generations of readers have not always noticed the difference.

What Clarke Got Right

To be accurate, Clarke didn’t invent the brutality he described. The secondary penal stations: Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island, Port Arthur, were genuinely terrible. The flogging of convicts in chain gangs was real. The Alexander Pearce case, which underlies the cannibalism episode, actually happened. Clarke drew on documented incidents, and the transportation system was, by any standard, cruel and exploitative.

The problem is not that Clarke fabricated horrors. It’s that he selected, concentrated, and dramatised them in ways that distort the overall picture, and then claimed, with some cheek, that there were no exaggerations. The typical assigned convict, working in a trade they knew, housed and fed by a private employer, living something not entirely unlike a constrained working life, is essentially absent from Clarke’s novel. That person doesn’t make for good Victorian fiction. But that person was the statistical norm.

The Damage Done

None of this is to rehabilitate the transportation system. It was a brutal exercise in colonial power that destroyed lives, separated families, and subjected people, mostly poor, mostly from the margins of British and Irish society, to conditions of coercion that no amount of revisionist reframing can make acceptable.

But there is a difference between condemning the historical reality and accepting a novelist’s dramatisation of it as fact. When Australians read Clarke and come away believing that flogging was the universal, relentless experience of every convict at every stage of their sentence, they carry a distorted picture: one that obscures the economic calculations behind the system, the variation in convict experience, and the actual mechanisms by which the colonial administration controlled its workforce.

Clarke was a great Australian novelist. For the Term of His Natural Life is a serious literary achievement, and it deserves its place in the canon on those terms. What it doesn’t deserve is its unearned status as a history text.

He was wrong about the exaggerations. He exaggerated. And 150 years later, it’s worth saying so.

Further Reading

Primary source Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). Available free at Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org

Convict history and the revisionist debate Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station (Allen & Unwin, 2008)

Kippen, R., & McCalman, J. (2015). Mortality under and after sentence of male convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1840–1852. The History of the Family, 20(3), 345–365.

Flogging and punishment Penelope Edmonds and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing: Flogging and Humanitarian Reform in Penal Australia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 17(1), 2016

Mortality and punishment Rebecca Kippen and Iain McCalman, ‘Mortality Under and After Sentence of Male Convicts Transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1840–1852’, The History of the Family, 20(3), 2015

Digital resources The Digital Panopticon: digitalpanopticon.org — searchable database of convict records including the Founders and Survivors VDL dataset

TAHO Tasmanian Name Index: linc.tas.gov.au — primary source convict records online

Useful dates in relation to this article

1846 – 1881 Marcus Clarke
1870 – 1872 – serialisation of For the Term of His Natural Life in The Australian Journal
1927 – Movie For the Term of His Natural Life was the most expensive Australian silent film of its time. For more information: The National Film and Sound Archive  https://www.nfsa.gov.au/stories/articles/natural-life The film was completely restored by the National Film and Sound Archive in 2024–2025
1983 – Television miniseries For the Term of His Natural Life 

Opening and closing dates of penal settlements mentioned in the book

I am the author of hobarthistory.com.au and I am completing Speaker for the Dead – a history of capital punishment in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania 1806–1946.

The post “No Exaggerations”: Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, and the History That Wasn’t appeared first on Hobart History.

On 2 March 1841, a woman named Sarah Nicholls stood before the Supreme Court of Van Diemen’s Land and was convicted of bigamy. She received seven years — the maximum the law allowed. It is the earliest bigamy conviction in the colonial court record, and it raises an immediate question: what had Sarah Nicholls actually done?

We know, because she told the court herself. She had been married to a man named Nichols for two years, having married him at Trinity Church Hobart on 23 September 1839.

That marriage had broken down. A while after Sarah met Thomas Soles, married him at St George’s Church Sorell, and lived with him for five months.

Then her first husband had her prosecuted.

Not the police. Not a concerned citizen. Her first husband – the man she had left – had used the criminal law to pursue her, and the court gave her the maximum sentence available. Sarah Nicholls arrived in Van Diemen’s Land not as a transported convict but as a free woman. She left the courtroom facing seven years in the convict system.

The answer to “why would someone commit bigamy?” almost never involves a calculating fraudster or a deliberate deceiver. More often, it involves a broken marriage, an absent spouse, and a human need to build a new life. The law called it a serious crime. The courts, more often than not, quietly declined to treat it as one. But in 1841, nobody declined.

A Colony Built for Separation

Van Diemen’s Land was, by design, a place of broken families. Transportation severed marriages across hemispheres. A convict shipped from Cork or Liverpool might never see their spouse again. The wife left behind in England faced an impossible legal position: her husband was alive, somewhere, but gone. She could not remarry. She could not divorce. She could only wait.

And wait people did — for years, sometimes decades. But waiting has its limits, and life has its demands. New relationships formed. New households were established. Eventually, some of those relationships were formalised in church or registry, making one or both parties technically criminals under English law.

The colony knew this. Prosecutors knew this. The men of the juries knew this. Which is why a significant number of bigamy charges in the colonial period were simply ignored: cases thrown out before they reached trial, or resolved with a nolle prosequi: the Crown quietly declining to proceed. The machinery of justice went through the motions and then stepped aside.

The Impossible Marriage Law

For those who did face trial, the underlying problem was the same: divorce in colonial Tasmania was extraordinarily difficult, and for most ordinary people, practically impossible.

Until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1860, Tasmania had no local divorce jurisdiction at all. A spouse wanting a legal dissolution had to pursue a private Act of Parliament in London, a process so expensive and so remote that it simply did not exist for working people. After 1860, local divorce became possible, but it remained slow, costly, and socially ruinous, particularly for women.

The practical result was that thousands of marriages that had failed, through desertion, cruelty, prolonged absence, or simple incompatibility, remained legally intact regardless of what either party wanted. A husband who had vanished ten years ago was still, legally, a husband. A wife who had left and started a new family elsewhere was still, legally, a wife.

For people in this situation, bigamy was not a choice between crime and respectability. It was a choice between crime and living alone indefinitely, with no legal recourse and no realistic prospect of one.

What the Court Record Shows

Between 1841 and the 1946, 114 bigamy cases came before the Tasmanian Supreme Court: 82 involving men, 32 involving women. The pattern of outcomes tells its own story.

Women were acquitted, or had charges dropped, at nearly twice the rate of men. When they were convicted, they were far more likely to receive what can only be described as nominal punishment. Ivy Steer was sentenced to ten minutes detention. Catherine Smith to one hour. Daphne Grundy was imprisoned until the rising of the court later that day and then discharged. Hannah White served twenty-four hours.

These were not sentences. They were the judiciary’s way of saying: we are required to find you guilty, but we decline to pretend this is serious.

Men received slightly more substantial terms on average, but the same pattern appears: detained until the rising of the court, suspended sentences, bind-overs requiring good behaviour. By the early twentieth century, particularly as the First Offenders Act came into wider use, suspended sentences had become the default for most bigamy convictions. The courts had effectively stopped punishing the offence while continuing to record it.

The Few Who Deserved Punishment

The genuine fraudster, the serial bigamist who deceived multiple women for financial gain, or who used false identity to evade consequences, did appear occasionally, and the record shows courts were capable of treating such cases quite differently. Heavy sentences of three, four or seven years occasionally occurred. But these cases were the exception. The great majority of defendants in the bigamy record were ordinary people caught in impossible domestic circumstances, doing what humans do: trying to live, and love, within the constraints available to them.

What Happened to Sarah Nicholls

The sentence was seven years, but the punishment did not end there. Her conduct record, preserved in TAHO and transcribed by the Female Convicts Research Centre, shows what the seven years actually meant in practice.

She spent the first twelve months in the Female Factory.

The Lieutenant Governor’s decision of 8 March 1841, just six days after sentencing, specified that she was then to be assigned to any district removed from the residence of either of her husbands. Even the Lieutenant Governor appears to have understood that this was a domestic dispute routed through the criminal courts, and quietly ensured she would not be returned to the vicinity of the man who had prosecuted her, or the other man she had married.

What followed across the next several years was a catalogue of resistance.

She absconded. She was absent without leave. She was found on a boat at eleven at night. She was found in bed with a man during the day. Each infraction brought further punishment: hard labour, solitary confinement, more restrictions. By 1848, the authorities had had enough: she was assigned to the interior and barred from entering Hobart Town.

It is tempting to read this as a story of a difficult woman. It is more accurate to read it as a story of a free woman who did not accept that the law had the right to control her movements, and who kept testing its limits because the alternative was submission to a system that had already treated her with spectacular injustice. The punishments didn’t deter her. They didn’t reform her. They kept her poor and controlled, and eventually pushed her out of sight.

Did Any of It Serve the Public Good?

Sarah Nicholls’s case makes the question almost answer itself. Her original offence harmed nobody. Her prosecution was initiated not by the state but by a private individual pursuing a personal grievance. The maximum sentence was imposed on a free woman for a five-month marriage that had hurt nobody except a husband’s pride.

The system’s response to her subsequent resistance was to pile punishment on punishment — because it had no other mechanism. It could not ask whether the original sentence was just. It could not consider whether a different approach might work. It could only respond to each infraction with more of what had already failed.

The bigamy record across 114 Supreme Court cases tells the same story in aggregate. Token sentences measured in minutes and hours. Bills ignored by juries. Charges quietly dropped. Suspended sentences requiring good behaviour. The pattern is not one of a system confidently enforcing a necessary law. It is one of a system going through the motions of a law it did not quite believe in, applied to people it did not quite want to punish — with the occasional exception, like Sarah Nicholls, where someone with a private grievance and the right to prosecute decided to push the machinery into motion.

The stories of the 114 people who came before the Tasmania Supreme Court on bigamy charges are, in the end, mostly stories about the gap between what the law demanded and what human life requires. The law demanded lifelong fidelity to a legal instrument regardless of circumstance. Human life required the freedom to form new bonds when old ones had broken beyond repair.

The courts understood this, eventually. It took the law considerably longer to catch up.

—

Sources: Prosecution Project database; TAHO Supreme Court records; Female Convicts Research Centre: conduct record transcription for Sarah Nicholls. Sentence data compiled from the VDL/Tasmania Supreme Court bigamy case register.

The post When Two Meant Trouble: Bigamy in VDL appeared first on Hobart History.

The Impossible Contract

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

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

A Job Without the Means to Do It

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

For a shepherd, that meant the sheep.

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

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

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

The Rigged Ledger

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

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

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

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

The Hostage Arrangement

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

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

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

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

What the System Made of John Long

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The impossible contract appeared first on Hobart History.

Norfolk Island — a brief timeline

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

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

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

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

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

The immediate cause was a cooking pot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Cookpot Riots: how a cooking pot sparked a violent and bloody uprising appeared first on Hobart History.

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

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

What was a gibbet?

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

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

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

The Murder Act 1752

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why dissection was feared

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

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

The Hobart gallows in practice

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

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

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

The last gibbets

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

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

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

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

The Race Course

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

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

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

Flogged First, Then Tried

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Legal Tangle

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

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

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

A Stain Upon the Annals of the Island

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

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

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

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

          He was, the newspapers agreed, very young.

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

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

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

Transcription of the conduct record

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

Arrived VDL Oct 1828

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 18 1834 Absconding — 100 Lashes

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

Apr 16 1834 Executed at Hobart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*James Wilson bio:

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

**A note on dropsy

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

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

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