Introductory; Characteristics of the Convicts Sent to Australia; Bushranging: Origin and Meaning of the Term; The Cat and the Double Cat; Condition of the Prisoners: Some Terrible Revelations; The Desperation of Despair; Some Flogging Stories; The Bushranging Act and Its Abuses; Opinions of the Magistrates; Savage Treatment of Criminals Continued to the Present Time; Brutality not Cured by Brutal Punishment; Where Bushranging First Began.
The species of brigandage known in Australia as bushranging was, without doubt, evolved, more or less directly, from the convict system established as the basis of the earlier settlements in the island continent. The first bushrangers were simply men who took to the bush to escape work and enjoy freedom of action. Under the harsh laws of the Georgian era the greater criminals were hung, and not transported, and the convicts sent to "Botany Bay," in the eighteenth and the earlier years of the nineteenth centuries, were generally men to whom the trammels of the civilisation of their day were irksome. Many of them were political agitators, industrial rioters, and machine-breakers. The others were poachers and similarly comparatively mild offenders against the laws, who, under the present laws of Great Britain, would be sufficiently punished with a few months' imprisonment. Many of these men, when they were removed to a new land where the social conditions did not press so heavily on them, became honest and reputable citizens, and, perhaps, but for the harsh treatment they were subjected to, numbers of others who were driven to continue their fight against authority, might also have lived quiet and useful lives. This subject is a very delicate one, and it is not my intention to pursue it further here; but if it could be fully treated without giving offence to numbers of worthy and, in some cases, justly honoured residents of Australia, some very valuable lessons might be learned from the histories of some of those families whose founders could not live in England without offending against the laws, but who could and did earn the respect of their fellow colonists in Australia who were not "sent out."
The student of history in Australia is reminded, perhaps more forcibly than his fellow in England, that the humanitarian spirit, now so distinguishing a trait in the Anglo-Saxon character, is of very recent growth. Under the operation of this new force the criminal law of England was rapidly softened and ameliorated, and with every advance in this direction the character of the convicts sent out to Australia steadily deteriorated, if I may so describe the process. With every alteration in the law a fresh class of criminal was transported, and these with few exceptions would, a few months before, have been hung. At first, pickpockets, then sheep and horse-stealers, forgers and others, who had previously only escaped the gallows in rare instances, when they could find some influential friend to take sufficient interest in them to plead their cause, were now transported as a matter of course. This process continued until transportation ceased, and as the last batch of prisoners sent out was presumably the worst, having been guilty of more heinous crimes than their predecessors, we are too apt to judge the earlier convicts harshly from our knowledge of the later ones. The general effect was that while, with the amelioration of the laws, crime steadily decreased in England, it just as steadily increased in Australia, and no doubt the worst criminals were transported to Van Diemen's Land after transportation had ceased to New South Wales in 1842. The laws of England previously to the great changes made during the past sixty years seem to me to have operated, whether designedly or not, to clear the country of the disaffected and the discontented, rather than the criminal. How far the introduction of large numbers of this class into the country may have paved the way for modern advances in liberal government in Australia, is a question which it might be profitable to study; but it only relates to the bushrangers so far as it enables us to account for the large number of men who "took to the bush."
The earlier bushrangers seem to have been idle and dissolute, rather than criminal, characters. They watched for an opportunity to escape into a patch of scrub whenever the eye of the sentry in charge of them was turned away, and the nature of the country was so favourable to this method of evasion that it constituted a continuous challenge to them to run away, and, almost incredible as it may appear now, numbers of men started northward or westward in hopes of reaching the Dutch or English settlements at Batavia, Singapore, Hong Kong, or some other place in that direction. It must be remembered that the majority of the working classes at the beginning of the century could not read and had no knowledge of geography. They had heard sailors speak of these settlements and had no idea that hundreds of miles of sea flowed between them and Australia. How many of these poor ignorant men lost their lives in the attempt to achieve the impossible cannot be said, but some terrible stories of cannibalism have been related in connection with this phase of bushranging. The majority of the "runaways," however, had no such definite ideas as these, erroneous as they may have been. They hoped to be able to live in freedom in the bush and to subsist on fruits, roots, or other native growths. Some few joined a tribe of blacks and stayed longer or shorter times with them; others simply wandered about until hunger drove them back; while very many remained at large until they were captured, and these lived by stealing from farmers and other settlers any articles which could be eaten or sold. When one of these early bushrangers grew tired of his freedom he gave himself up at the nearest police station and received fifty lashes. The penalty for a second offence was twelve months in a chain gang.
There was no adequate system of classifying the convicts. It was the custom in advertising runaways to give the name of the man and that of the ship in which he was transported. Then followed the personal description, and that was all. It was admitted to be inconvenient, but no attempt appears to have been made to improve it. Besides this, for administration purposes, convicts were divided into three classes according to their sentences. Thus there were men who had been transported for "seven" years, for "fourteen" years, or for "life." They were also classified as "young," "middle-aged," and "old," and usually the crime for which they had been transported was specified, but such a description gave no indication of the character of the man. Finally they were divided into "town thieves," "rural labourers," and "gentlemen." This was a step in the right direction, but it was too vague to be of much use. The educated convicts were all classified as "gentlemen" whether they came from the towns or the rural districts.[1] It is worthy of note that the proportion of skilled labourers, or tradesmen as they are called, was very small. Very few men who had been apprenticed to a trade were among the convicts sent to Australia at any time.
There were no regulations as to hours of work, and the severe taskmaster might work his assigned servants as many hours as he pleased. It was generally understood that Sunday was to be a holiday, or day of rest, but excuses were readily found for making the convicts work on this day, and this was a fruitful source of discontent. Very frequently men absconded on Saturday night, remained in the bush on Sunday, and returned on Monday to take the customary fifty lashes and resume work.
If flogging is efficacious in preventing crime, it should have made the convict colonies the most virtuous places on earth, for the "cat" was in almost continuous use in New South Wales and in Van Diemen's Land. The "cat" generally used was the ordinary military or naval cat; but "the cat used at Macquarie Harbour was a larger and heavier instrument than that used generally for the punishment of soldiers or sailors. It was called the thief's cat, or double cat-o'-nine-tails. It had only the usual number of tails, but each of these was a double twist of whipcord, and each tail had nine knots. It was a very formidable instrument indeed."[2] How far the influence of this barbarous instrument of torture tended to make the prisoners at Macquarie Harbour the most reckless and ferocious of the convicts of Australia it is unnecessary to enquire, but there can be no doubt that its influence was for evil and not for good. It is with the ordinary "cat," with which England in these barbarous times flogged her defenders as ferociously as she did her prisoners, that we have to deal; and, frightful as the tortures were which were inflicted on the convicts, we have positive evidence that their lot was looked upon with envy by the soldiers who guarded them. Several soldiers in New South Wales deliberately committed crime so that they might be convicted, in the hope that, by good conduct, they might earn some of the indulgences open to convicts. The fact is that any prisoner who contrived, by obsequiousness or in any other way, to make friends with an official, had his way made easy for him, while the independent, whether industrious or not, were ruthlessly persecuted until, in many cases, they were finally forced to the gallows.
"The prisoners of all classes in Government are fed with the coarsest food; governed with the most rigid discipline; subjected to the stern, and frequently capricious and tyrannical will of an overseer; for the slightest offence (sometimes for none at all—the victim of false accusation) brought before a magistrate, whom the Government has armed with the tremendous powers of a summary jurisdiction, and either flogged, or sentenced to solitary confinement, or retransported to an iron gang, where he must work in heavy irons, or to a penal settlement, where he will be ruled with a rod of iron. If assigned to a private individual he becomes a creature of chance. He may fall into the hands of a kind indulgent master, who will reward his fidelity with suitable acknowledgments; but, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he will find his employer suspicious, or whimsical, or a blockhead, not knowing good conduct from bad, or a despot, who treats him like a slave, cursing and abusing, and getting him flogged for no reasonable cause. He may be harassed to the very death—he may be worked like a horse, and fed like a chameleon. The master, though not invested by law with uncontrolled power, has yet great authority, which may be abused in a thousand ways precluding redress. Even his legal power is sufficiently formidable. A single act of disobedience is a sufficient ground of complaint before the magistrate, and is always severely dealt with. But, besides the master's power, the prisoners are in some measure under a dominion to the free population at large; any man can give him in charge without ceremony. If seen drunk, if seen tippling in the public-house, if met after hours in the street, if unable to pay his trifling debt, if impertinent—the free man has nothing more to do than to send him to the watch-house, and get him punished. The poor prisoner is at the mercy of all men."[3] This appears to be a fair and unexaggerated statement of the conditions, and therefore it is little cause for wonder that the general tone of morality in the colony was low. Mr. J.T. Bigge says that "every opportunity was seized for cheating. When the convicts attended at the store to draw their weekly rations, supplies were frequently drawn for men not at work there. False lists of men employed in the various gangs were made out."[4] In fact, the Government of the Colony was a military despotism under which corruption was rampant, so that the authorities themselves set an example of immorality which the convicts were not slow to follow. "The police made a considerable revenue by blackmailing convicts who were in business."[5] Those who could pay were allowed to continue to enjoy a freedom to which they were not legally entitled, while those who would not, or could not, be blackmailed, to satisfy the exorbitant demands of the so-called custodians of the peace, speedily "got into trouble," and were prosecuted. It was said that if a man could escape from a country district and go to Sydney he might, if he could afford to dress well, pass as a free man without attracting attention. A blacksmith named Brady, assigned to Major James Mudie, of Castle Forbes, eluded the police in this way for nearly two years. He was recognised by a fellow convict, some time before he was captured, but this man "let him go for £5." Such cases, however, were exceptions to the general rule. The majority of runaways went into the bush and not into the town, and the Sydney and Hobart Town Gazettes in early times contain numerous proclamations by the various governors calling upon all well disposed persons to assist the military in capturing runaways. Some of the issues of these Gazettes contain columns of the names and descriptions of persons variously styled "absconders," "absentees," "bolters," or "bushrangers." In these the term "bushranger" appears most frequently in New South Wales, while "bolter" was the more popular in Van Diemen's Land. The first bushrangers, therefore, were men who "took to the bush" to escape work, and therefore it was quite possible for a man to be a bushranger without committing any depredations on his more prosperous fellows.