Horrors of Transportation Era

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 768, 14 September 1929, Page 20

Horrors of Transportation Era

When Criminals and Others were Herded Overseas for Major and Minor Offences . . . Chronicle Describes Miseries o Penal Settlement . . .

S this memoir of out of i .JRBRnL the many thousand criminals transported IHAjsj to old Australia an exact chronicle? (asks ti—Percy Hutchison, rereviewing the “Adventures of an Outlaw—The Memoirs of Ralph Rashleigh, a Penal Exile in Australia, 1525-1544”). The question may be argued from two sides. An introduction says that “The man who wrote it cast his story in the form of a Victorian novel.” Inspection shows it to be not so much Victorian as it is a hybrid of James Fenimore Cooper and Daniel Defoe. The outlaw gives himself the name “Rashleigh,” a rather obvious concoction. It is stated that he died four years after the close of his extraordinary adventures when, as a convict, he was an assigned labourer on the ranch of a wealthy sheep raiser. The publishers tell us that the manuscript came to them from one Charles H. Bertie, “well-known librarian of Sydney, New South Wales.” Mr. Bertie explained that it had come into his hands “from a man who had inherited it from his wife's father in whose possession it had remained for 30 years.” The publishers admit certain rewritings of the story, “but. with absolute fidelity to the original.” However, the reviewer records these statements merely because they have been made. It is his conviction that although not all of the adventures which are alleged to have befallen “Rashleigh” necessarily befell any one particular convict, the essential truth of these adventures is as indisputable as the essential truth of “Robinson Crusoe.” Rashleigh is represented as the son on a London shopkeeper. He received a fair education and was articled to a conveyancer, but, finding >the progress toward wealth too slow', took to issuing false money. From this he progressed to smuggling and burglary. Eventually he was arrested and sentenced to deportation, but not until be had first been thoroughly flogged. Lashes up to the number of 100 or more on the bare back of a culprit, follow'ed with salt rubbed into the lacerations, were called for by the penal code of the day. Moreover, flogging was practised in the merchant service and in the navy. That such brutalities were eventually abolished, together with the entire inhuman system of deportation which made a virtual slave of the deported convict, are reforms on which civilisation may well be congratulated. The voyage out to Australia was. made in a ship of not over 500 tons, and 150 convicts were carried below decks. Conditions were little better than on t"he slavers which were plying in those days between Africa and the t\’eßtern World. The convicts were ironed and given but little food. Those consigned with Rashleigh attempted a

mutiny, which was, of course, quickly suppressed with several killed. It is necessary to understand in a general way tire penal system of Australia for what is to follow in the book. It was this: The colony was undermanned as to labour. antUit was Hie pretty theory of th- who devised the system that this deficiency could be supplied from the home prisons. The theory in itself was not so bad. It was the working out in practice that was bad. The theorist failed to take into account two psychological factors: First, that the convicts, having virtually been made slaves, would not work except under compulsion, and, second, that making the colonists masters of criminal slaves was simply to invite them to the practice of every sort of brutality. And there was another and still more serious defect. When a convict’s term had expired he was not permitted to return to England, but lie might take up a piece of land and in turn become a free colonist. The result of tliis was dreadful beyond words. Men who had been brutalised as convicts now had the opportunity to treat others with as little mercy as they had been treated, so that the system, instead of gradually lessening in brutality, always increased. Of course, there were the exceptions. Rashleigh’s first assignment was to the Government agricultural establishment at Emu Plains, a vast ranch on which convicts from city life were trained for the work they -would have to do in the colony. From Sydney the prisoners were marched thither on foot. There were certain regulations at this Government camp which made for further debasement of the convicts. A reward was given to keepers or overseers who captured runaway men, and these minor officials (themselves usually ticket-of-leave men) would connive to have prisoners run away and be captured . at appointed places, for which they would share with them the reward. So little did the convicts have to eat that they would fall in with these offers, and accept the consequent floggings for the sake of the pitiful recompense. What they did not understand was that, although they were conniving with their superiors, the offence went on the books, so that the damning record of incorrigibility stood always against .them. In one scene recounted by Rashleigh an overseer had placed a convictworkman in the dungeon. The latter had protested he had done nothing, and the overseer had replied lightly that he had incarcerated the other “for a lark.” Rashleigh gasped with excitement at the sudden change in Bright’s (the convict ’s) appearance. The man’s eyes suddenly fixed, every muscle in his body seemed to flex, while his face -went white with rage. “Then take that for a lark,” he

I snarl* d, as lie- swung his axe high and ; brought it down with such force that the over.-eer’s head was cleaved to the j jawbone. Immediately surrounded and distort with utmost coolness. “If only I could have got my axe loose, I’d have made dogs’ meat of a dozen of you ! b!oody tyrants." And at his trial, at which; of course he was convicted, he ■ expressed tersely what was undoubt- ! odly the unexpressed sentiment of j every convict in Australia: | “I was tired of the whole damned i business. Life was just hell. All 1 wish is that 1 was to swing for killing a hundred blasted overseers instead of one, you miserable tyrants.” It is not possible to quote from the long narrative of the bushrangers—- ■ for the reason that the author’s style is too discursive to allow for an adequate reconstruction through the use of excerpts. Rashleigh represents himself as being pressed into one of these gangs after an escape from the terrible ordeals to which those at Emu Plains were subjected. The bushrangers, being doubly outlawed, were men des> perate beyond all belief. The gang in which Rashleigh was virtually held as a prisoner, obliged to cook for his captors and do whatever he was bidden, is represented to have burned alive an entire family, including the women and children, because the loot was not sufficient for their greed. If they captured any from the forces sent against them, they killed them with frightful tortures. “Adventures of an Outlaw,” with its basis of essential truth, may be taken in two ways—as an account of thd frightful days when New South Wales was utilised for penal servitude and as a moderately good piece of semi-romantic fiction. In composition, besides suggesting Defoe and Cooper, the yarn in places is not j unlike the type of pirate story ifr [ which a character of lesser depravity, j than the others is. pressed into service !so that in the account this person gains the sympathy of the reader by 1 reason of his comparative virtue.