CHAPTER XIII.
TRANSPORTATION.
AFTER five days’ steady steaming across the great Australian bight, north of which lies the true “Terra Australia incognita,” I reached King George‘s Sound—“Le Port du Roi Georges en Australie,” as I saw it written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of a great land-locked harbor, the little houses of bright white stone that make up the town of Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, unlike that of the greater portion of Australia is damp and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flowering bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and curiously-cut leaves.
The contrast between the scenery and the people of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of filthy natives—tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow clay; the “colonists” by a gang of fiend-faced convicts working in chains upon the esplanade, and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with bull-dogs on the pier, while the native women, half clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is never done in West Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of labor is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves.
Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, West Australia, then called Swan River, although one of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by the free gift to the first settlers of vast territories useless without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be made a penal settlement, and though at the instance of Victoria transportation to the Australias has now all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still the most considerable convict establishment we possess across the seas.
At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts or emancipists within the “colony,” of whom 1500 were in prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of-leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over 5000 had been released upon conditional pardons: 600 of the convicts had arrived from England in 1865. Out of a total population, free and convict, of 20,000, the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500, or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women and children.
If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done but little for the settlement, they have at least enabled us to draw the moral, that transportation and free emigration cannot exist side by side: the one element must overbear and destroy the other. In Western Australia, the convicts and their keepers form two-thirds of the whole population, and the district is a great English prison, not a colony, and exports but a little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton.
Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts as with free settlers: fifty or sixty convicts have successfully escaped from the settlement within the last few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take place annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a month or two, although sheltered by the people, the vast majority of whom are ticket-of-leave men or ex-convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes and one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy unsuccessful attempts at escape are reported every year.
On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a man at work in ponderous irons. The sun was striking down on him in a way that none can fancy who have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal, and his labor was of the heaviest; now he had to prise up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to handle pick and shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an armed warder, who idled in the shade by the roadside. This was an “escape-man,” thus treated with a view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to get away from Albany. No wonder that the “chain-gang” system is a failure, and the number both of attempts and actual escapes heavier under it than before the introduction of this tremendous punishment.
Many of the “escapes” are made with no other view than to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the last return trip of the ship in which I sailed from Adelaide to King George‘s Sound, a convict coal-man was found built up in the coal-heap on deck: he and his mates at Albany had drawn lots to settle which of them should be thus packed off by the help of the others “for a change.” Of ultimate escape there could be no chance; the coal on deck could not fail to be exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and this they knew. When he emerged, black, half smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, he allowed himself to be quietly ironed, and so kept till the ship reached Adelaide, when he was given up to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for punishment. Acts of this class are common enough to have received a name. The offenders are called “bolters for a change.”
A convict has been known when marching in his gang suddenly to lift up his spade, and split the skull of the man who walked in front of him, thus courting a certain death for no reason but to escape from the monotony of toil. Another has doubled his punishment for fun by calling out to the magistrates, “Gentlemen, pray remember that I am entitled to an iron-gang, because this is the second time of my absconding.”