Prisons Over Seas / Deportation and Colonization; British and American Prisons of To-day

by Arthur Griffiths

CHAPTER II THE GROWTH OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Large amount of convict labour available for employment—Free settlers too few to utilise it—Applied chiefly to public works—Premature erection of public edifices—Convicts given good wages and plentiful drink—Many grow rich—Governor Macquarie favours convicts unduly—Hostility shown him—Strong antagonism between classes—Great impetus to free emigration—Convict labour in demand—System of assignment revived—Discipline maintained by the "cat"—Efforts toward fair administration.

The peculiar condition of the colony now was the presence therein of a supply of convict labour, growing larger also from day to day as vessels with their cargoes arrived, for which there was no natural demand. When General Macquarie assumed the government the influx of male convicts had been so great in the five years preceding 1809, that the free settlers were unable to find employment for more than an eighth of the total number, though the labour was to be had for the asking, and cost nothing but the price of raising the food the convicts consumed. In point of fact, the free settlers were still too few and their operations too limited. Seven-eighths of the whole supply remaining on hand, it became necessary for the governor to devise artificial outlets. He was anxious, as he tells Earl Bathurst, "to employ this large surplus of men in some useful manner, so that their labour might in some degree cover the expense of their feeding and clothing." The measures by which he endeavoured to compass this shall now be described.

There is a stage in the youthful life of every colony when the possession of an abundant and cheap supply of labour is of vital importance to its progress. Settlers in these early days were neither numerous enough nor wealthy enough to undertake for themselves the work of reclaiming land, of establishing harbours and internal communications on a scale sufficiently wide to insure the due development of the young country. At such an epoch a plentiful supply of convict labour pouring in at the cost of the home government is certain to be highly valuable. Merivale points out how some such timely assistance to British Columbia in more recent years would have given an enormous impetus to the development of those provinces. It would be premature to discuss, at this period of my narrative, the question whether the advantages gained would outweigh the positive evils of a recurrence to transportation on any grand scale. Some of these evils might disappear if the system were carried out with all the safeguards and precautions that our lengthened experience would supply. But the main objection—the excessive costliness of the scheme—would remain.

This stage New South Wales had now reached, and the governor, finding himself amply supplied with the labour so urgently needed, bent all his energies to bringing forward the latent resources of the colony. His reign began at a period of great scarcity. Repeated inundations on the Hawkesbury had entailed disastrous losses on the whole community. He decided, therefore, to form new towns at points beyond the reach of the floods, and to open up to them, and throughout the province, those means of communication which are so essential to the progress of a new country. Upon the construction of these roads he concentrated all his energies and all the means at his disposal. Not much skilled labour was needed, yet the work was punitive and was also beneficial to the whole community. No better employment could have been devised for the convicts. Under his directions, towns before disconnected were joined by means of excellent highways, while other good roads were driven through wild regions hitherto unsettled if not altogether unexplored. The greatest exploit of that period was the construction of the road across the Blue Mountains to Bathurst, the whole length of which was 276 miles; and there were, besides, good wooden bridges at all necessary points. Beyond doubt, to these facilities of intercommunication is to be attributed the early advance of the colony in wealth and prosperity.

But Governor Macquarie's other undertakings, though well intentioned, were not equally well designed either for the improvement of the colony or the amelioration of its people. No doubt his was a difficult task, his course hard to steer. He had means almost unlimited, a glut of labour, and behind him were the open purse-strings of the mother-country. How was he to make the most of his advantages? This labour, of which his hands were full, came from a mass of convicts, each one of whom already represented a considerable charge on the imperial funds. It had been expensive to transport him; now he was costly to keep. Could he not be made in some measure to recoup the treasury for the outlay he occasioned? It was obvious that he should, if possible, contribute to his own support. Yet Governor Macquarie, in spite of his promises, aimed at nothing of the kind. His chief object—next after making roads—was to embellish the principal towns of the colony with important public works—works for the most part unnecessary, and hardly in keeping with the status of the young settlement. Roads were urgently needed; but not guildhalls, vast hospitals, spacious quays, churches, schools, houses and public offices. In these earlier years, buildings of more modest dimensions might well have sufficed for all needs. But under the Macquarie regime Sydney sprang from a mere shanty town into a magnificent city. It was almost entirely reconstructed on a new plan, the lines of which are retained to this day. The convict huts gave place to prisoners' barracks, the mean dwellings of the settlers to streets of imposing houses. The whole external aspect of Sydney and Parramatta was changed. In all, the new public buildings numbered more than 250, and the list of them fills ten closely printed pages of a parliamentary report.

Yet all this expenditure was not only wasteful and at the time unnecessary, but its direct tendency was to demoralise the population. The labourers required for works of such importance were of course collected together upon the scene of operations. In other words, crowds of convict artisans were congregated in the towns, and countenanced each other in vice. Many of the works were carried out by contract, the contractors employing convict hands, bond or free, still serving or emancipated; and in both cases they paid wages half in cash, and half in property, which consisted of groceries and ardent spirits. This was the "truck system," neither more nor less, which the contractors made still more profitable to themselves by establishing public-houses close to their works, at which the cash half of the wages soon returned to them in exchange for the drink supplied. Naturally vice and immorality grew apace. The condition of the towns was awful, and the low pleasures in which they abounded attracted to them many people who might otherwise have been contented to live quietly upon their grants of land. But the choice between congenial society with plenty of drink, and the far-off clearing with honest labour for its only joy, was soon made in favour of the former, and every one who could, flocked into the towns. The governor had indeed tried hard to form an agricultural population. With this object he had conceded larger grants than his predecessors, in the hopes that emancipated convicts would settle upon them and reform. It was thought that "the hope of possessing property, and of improving their condition and that of their families, afforded the strongest stimulus to their industry, and the best security for their good conduct." But these advantages were remote, and gave way at once before the present certainty of being able to barter away the land they got for nothing or in exchange for ten or fifteen gallons of rum. If this plan of manufacturing industrious small proprietors out of the recently emancipated convicts was meant to answer, the grant of land should have been made conditional on actual residence thereon, and accompanied by tangible results gained by actual labour done, which must be shown before the acres were finally conveyed. Now it was proved that many of Governor Macquarie's grantees never took possession of their land at all: the order for thirty acres was changed at once for the much coveted means of dissipation. Hence, though towns grew fast in beauty and importance, the forest lands or wild tracts in the interior remained unsettled; and the crowds of ex-criminals who might, by judicious treatment, have turned into virtuous farmers, rapidly degenerated into a mass of drunken dissipated idlers.

These were indeed fine times for the convicts. There was labour for all, remunerative, and not too severe; liquor was cheap, and above all the governor was their friend. It would be, however, more than unfair to charge General Macquarie with any but the best motives in his tenderness for the convict class. He conceived that the unfortunate people who composed it were the especial objects of his solicitude. To promote their reform, and to bring them to that prosperity which should make this reform something more than mere idle profession—these, as he thought, were among the first of his duties as the governor of a penal colony. In his prosecution of such views he did not halt half way. The manner in which he favoured and encouraged the emancipists came to be a by-word. It was said in the colony that the surest claim on Governor Macquarie's confidence and favour was that of having once worn the badge of a convicted felon. Very early in his reign he made it clear that this would be his policy. The year after his arrival he advanced one ex-convict to the dignity of a justice of the peace; another was made his private medical adviser; and both, with many others, were admitted to his table at Government House. Nor were the recipients of these favours always the most deserving among their fellows for the honours showered upon them. It was taken for granted that the possession of considerable wealth was proof positive of respectability regained; yet in the case of Governor Macquarie's emancipist magistrate, it was notorious that he had become rich by methods of which honest men would hardly be proud. Transported as a lad for rick burning, after serving his time in the colony he had been a shop-keeper, a constable, and last a publican; in which line, by means of liberal credit, he had soon amassed a fortune. His case was only one of many in which ex-convicts had grown rich, chiefly by preying on their still more unfortunate comrades, taking mortgages on grants as payment for long arrears of accounts for groceries and drink, and by and by seizing all the land. But no more emancipists were made magistrates after 1824.

Then, in many instances, members of the convict class were by far the shrewdest and best educated in the whole community. Settlers of the better class were few in number, so the sharp rogues had it all their own way. They had capital moreover. Several brought money with them to the colony, the fruit of their villainies, or their wives followed them with considerable sums acquired in similar fashion. For these men, especially if they had held fairly good positions at home, transportation was almost a farce. It merely meant removal at the public expense to a land, remote certainly, but in which they were little less comfortable than at home, and where they moreover had exceptional facilities for making money fast; and they had it all to themselves. Governor Macquarie discouraged free emigration. He did not want to see settlers. He looked upon them as out of place, nay more, as a positive encumbrance to the colony. New South Wales was a settlement, he said, made by convicts for convicts—"meant for their reformation; and free people had no right to come to it." So he continued to pat his favourites on the back: gave them land, and more land, as many assigned servants—their former partners possibly in many a guilty scheme—as they wished; and last but not least, provided a market for the very crops he had assisted them (by convict labour) to raise. It was not strange, then, that with a yearly influx of thousands of new hands, and the rapid upward advance of all who were ordinarily steady and industrious, the emancipists should come as a class to gain strength far in excess of their deserts, and sufficient from their numbers to swamp all other classes in the community.