CONVICT LIFE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 494, 25 October 1928, Page 15

CONVICT LIFE

New Story of Early Sydney LIBRARIAN S FIND OF MSS. There is to be published in London another book on Australian convict life. It is from a manuscript that came into the hands of Mr. C. H. Bertie, the Sydney city librarian, some three months ago* He sent it to Jonathan Cape, the Loudon publisher. The story is of the life ol on? Ralph Rashleigh, who was sent to the colonies as a convict. It is as grim as “For the Term of His Natural Life.’* Farts of it, if they had been told by Marcus Clarke, would have rung more terribly with tragedy than his own book did. But this manuscript tells the story in an extraordinary way. I understand (says a Sydney writer) that the original is to be altered before publication. I read the original, and it is a strange story indeedv The anonymous writer is be- j lieved to have once been a squatter on the Beardy Plains. The story was written in 1845, and he has written it down, as he says in his introduction, as it was told to him by the man be ' refers to every few lines as “Our j Hero!” Birkenhead’s Foreword Lord Birkenhead, who has read the i manuscript, considers it so important a document that he has promised to j write a foreword. In the editing, I j am told, the old-fashioned “Our | Heroes,” and such time-honoured : phrases will not appear so often. I would like to see them all left in. They give the book the flavour of the time in Australia when it was written. But there is some moralising that will be well spared. In spite of its stilted style, I could scarcely put the manuscript down. It was amazing in its picture of the early life lived by the first settlers. It has done what Marcus Clarke did not succeed in doing. It has placed the free settlers in relation to the convicts, and it has shown the attitude of one to the other. Here is the picture that it gives of Svdney when the convict saw it first; in 1825: “The dwellings appeared to be chiefly on one storey; in fact, most of them deserved no better name than huts. The streets were narrow and straggling. There did not seem more than half a dozen good or convenient dwellings in the town. There was no cultivated land to be seen, but here and there a few miserable cottages peering out of the trees stood on the north side of the harbour, in which were then about six other large vessels (his own ’ large vessel was of 500 tons) at anchor, and a good number of small cutters and boats which were passing to and fro continually.” What a grim picture it paints of the whole miserable colony in those clays! It meanders through descriptions of starvation and floggings and murder and savagery that are unparalleled. Flogging a Matter of Course The man whose story it is was sent to the Beardy plains and hired out from there to a farmer, who flogged him as a matter of course, and which he seemed to accept as a matter of course. He was taken? from a lock-up by bushrangers, and two police were burned alive in it. He was taken about by the bushrangers in chains to do their cooking and to carry their supplies. He saw them tie one man down on an antbed and burn another at the stake. Then, it is told, casually, how he was tried for murder when the bushrangers were shot down. His death sentence was commuted, and he was sent to Newcastle to work in the coal mines for life. He could not work hal'd enough in Newcastle, and he discovered that there was a punishment even worse than floggings. He was sent to work with the lime burning gang. There they were flogged, and while their skins were raw they carried baskets of lime on their bare backs. They carried it into the water neck deep to load on to the barges that took it down the river. It is incredible, but it is there, and there is no ignoring this story as ! it is told. It rings true. It is a picture of a brutalised colony, and even at the time that this story was written the writer could pass over many incidents casually that made my blood run cold when I read them. Nothing is known by Mr. Bertie oi the author of the book. But the binding of the manuscript was made of two leaves of foolscap pasted together, and on the inside of these there was a list of the convicts allotted to a man at Port Macquarie. Mr. Charles H. Bertie write®: “The reference is to an old manuscript in ! my possession, so battered and worn ' that parts of it had to be deciphered with the aid of a strong glass. I had it typed last year, and it appeared to me that it would interest the read- j ing public outside as well as in- 1 side Australia. This view was con- 1 firmed when I submitted it to Mr. Jonathan Cape, who promptly accepted it for publication. The manuscript contains the adventures of a convict who reached Sydney about 1825, and the story taken from his own lips in 1845. There is nothing quite like it in our literature with its pictures of the life of convicts and settlers in the thirties of last century. ! Your correspondent refers to it as a “grim book.** It certainly deserves the adjective, but, at the same time, there is a most humorous account or a theatrical corps among the convicts at Beardy Plains, and a delight ful account of his adventures with a settler’s family.”