Norfolk Island: A final flourish

There were minor disturbances in 1841, 1842 and 1843 but a more violent affair in 1846. [1] Joseph Childs, commandant from 1844 to 1846, proved to be no match for the hardened convicts largely because he had no experience of life in a penal settlement. [2] When Robert Pringle Stuart visited Norfolk Island, he reported that Childs was ‘a most amiable benevolent gentleman and honourable officer’ but that what was needed to avoid anarchy and insubordination was ‘an officer of experience in, or capacity for, government, judgement, energy, decision and firmness’. [3] Childs was recalled but, before he left, a group of convicts revolted in July 1846, murdering four officials. [4]

As was usual with new commandants, Childs had cracked down on discipline and removed some privileges that convicts had become accustomed to. On 1 July 1846, William Westwood, a convicted bushranger also known as ‘Jackey Jackey’ led a mutiny provoked by Childs’ decision the previous day to remove the prisoners’ tins and knives and other utensils used for cooking their food and that all food would in future be cooked for them. [5] He attacked and brutally killed two overseers, a guard who called out that he had seen it all and another guard who was asleep. In half an hour, the military restored order at the point of the bayonet and convicts who had joined the riot quickly returned to their cells. Sentenced to death with twelve others, Westwood was hanged on 13 October 1846 by Childs’ successor, John Price, who considered Childs responsible for the state of affairs that led to the revolt. [6] A contemporary report blamed the situation on Childs’ ‘utter imbecility’. [7] There was one last event of convict defiance when, in March 1853, some convicts seized a government launch and attempted to row to freedom. In July, news was received that the launch had reached the coast of NSW and some of the runaways had been captured.

From the mid-1840s, there was growing pressure to end transportation to VDL, something that was finally achieved in 1853. The cost of maintaining the penal settlement on Norfolk Island was growing and Port Arthur in VDL was seen as a less costly alternative. This combined with increasing criticism by magistrates and clergymen of the nature of penal rule on Norfolk Island led to the decision to abandon the island for a second time. [8] The process began in 1847 and was completed in May 1855 when the last convicts were moved to VDL. [9] There was a further factor that played a part in this decision. With some irony, in Britain, Earl Grey, the Colonial Secretary, saw Norfolk as a possible home for the inhabitants of Pitcairn Islands, descendants of the mutineers from the Bounty and their Tahitian-Polynesian wives. [10]

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[1] On the attempted escape on the Governor Phillip, see Gipps to Lord Stanley, 15 August 1842, HRA Series I: Vol. 22, pp. 200-201.

[2] Barry, John V., ‘Childs, Joseph (1787-1870)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 220-221.

[3] Ibid, Stuart, Robert Pringle, and Naylor, Thomas Beagley, Norfolk Island, 1846: the accounts of Robert Pringle Stuart and Thomas Beagley Naylor, p. 69.

[4] ‘Disturbances at Norfolk Island’, The Australian, 8 August 1846, provides an account of events.

[5] Rutledge, Martha, ‘Westwood, William [Jackey Jackey] (1820-1846)’, ADB, Supplementary Volume, pp. 404-405.

[6] The Australian, 14 November 1846.

[7] Rogers, Henry, (ed.), Essays, Selected from Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2 Vols. (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans), 1850, Vol. 2, ‘Treatment of Criminals’, p. 506. The article was originally published in 1847.

[8] ‘Norfolk Island and Transportation’, The Australian, 18 February 1847, indicated that the ‘island establishment is to be immediately reduced to a very small scale’.

[9] Earl Grey to Sir Charles Fitzroy, 27 February 1847, HRA, Series I: Vol. 25, pp. 375-376.

[10] Murray, Thomas Boyles, Pitcairn, the island, the people, and the pastor: to which is added a short notice of the original settlement and present condition of Norfolk Island, (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), 1857, pp. 363-428, provides a valuable contemporary account of this process. See also, Belcher, Lady, (Diana Joliffe), The Mutineers of the Bounty and Their Descendants in Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, (Harmer & Brothers Publishers), 1871.

Finding a constitutional settlement

It’s barely twenty-four hours since the final result of the Scottish referendum and surprise, surprise, the three political parties are already daggers drawn over the future constitutional settlement.  Therein lies the problem—much as turkeys don’t vote for an early Christmas, politicians are not going to vote for any constitutional settlement that is dreamed up unless it protects their interests…what’s in the interest of the people or the country as a whole doesn’t appear to come into it.  Whether there’s a Constitutional Convention or a Grand Committee of the House or Royal Commission matters little because what will emerge will be politically neutral—a reflection of an evolutionary view of constitutional development—because that’s the only way Parliament will accept it. The result will not be the transformation of our increasingly out-dated constitution but tinkering around the edges while giving further powers to Scotland to dampen any further demands for independence.

I have heard the phrases ‘the genie's out of the bottle’ and ‘this is a transformative moment’ so many times in the last thirty years and yet our constitutional structures have—with the exception of devolution—remained largely unchanged.  We still have a House of Lords; there has been no change in the electoral system despite attempts to do so and the failed referendum; political power remains largely centralised in Westminster; the scandal of MPs’ expenses has not made MPs necessarily more accountable or less arrogant.  There also seems to be some confusion about constitutional matters.  Take for instance, the seemingly interchangeable nature of devolution and decentralisation in much discourse and yet they are very different beast.  The devolution of power means that Parliament gives up its sovereignty over say education to one of the current national parliaments that is then accountable to its electorate for education policy; the Westminster Parliament no longer has any responsibility for education at all.  Decentralisation does not involve the permanent transfer of powers merely the loaning of those powers to local authorities to carry out tasks previously done by central government; those powers are supervised by central government and can be taken back. 

There may be appetite for further constitutional change in Scotland but I’m not sure that the same can be said of England.  If the government resolves the West Lothian question by excluding Scottish MPs from voting on English issues, I would expect that calls for an English Parliament will rapidly fade.  It would also head off any residual threat from UKIP—one of the very effective results of David Cameron’s statement yesterday.  Whatever those in the ‘Westminster village’ think about the need for an English demos—and I agree with them--there is little evidence of a grassroots movement for constitutional change in England. 

What now?

With the votes counted and with a turnout of 84 per cent—unprecedented in modern British politics—it is clear that the United Kingdom is not about to be dismembered…well not in the immediate future.  The critical question was always going to be ‘what happens next?’ whether the vote for independence was won or lost.  Well it was lost and pretty emphatically.  The time has come to address the West Lothian question—why should Scottish MPs be able to vote on English matters and not vice versa.  One solution would be to complete the pack—give England its own Parliament in the same way that they exist in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—in other words establish a federal structure.  The role of Westminster would be relegated to being the national Parliament dealing only with issues that are common across the four countries in the Union.  So no West Lothian problem.  The fiction United Kingdom having a unitary constitution—today barely a credible proposition—would finally be ended.

At a stroke, you resolve a number of constitutional issues.  The English Parliament would be a unicameral institution like the other national parliaments.  The Union Parliament could retain two houses—making it something like the American Congress—or, more radically we could take this opportunity of abolishing the second chamber so that all parliaments in the UK have one chamber.  This could mean that the English Parliament meets in one of the current chambers in the Houses of Parliament and the Union Parliament in the other—good economics—or you could establish the English Parliament in say Birmingham centrally in the country.  You could also reduce the number of MPs to say 200 by having them chosen from within the national parliaments on the basis of say 1UMP per 100,000 of the population based on the proportion of parties within those parliaments; so Scotland with a population of about 3 million people would have 30 UMPs.  Each country would have its own First Minister while the Prime Minister would be the Union leader with a cabinet including the four First Ministers. 

Then there’s the vexed question of how MPs should be elected.  Proportional representation fell in the last referendum but a radical change in the nature of the British constitution will inevitably raise the question again.  I’m inclined to go for the system that apply in Wales combining first-past-the-post and the additional member system but the existing Scottish system with its regional dimension might be preferable.    Either way, the current electoral system needs a radical overhaul.

Finally, irrevocably it’s R-Day

The debate, one of the most dynamic I’ve ever seen, is over and voting is underway.  In less than twenty-four hours we’ll know whether Scotland has voted for independence or not.  Whether the ‘Stay Together’ campaign has done enough—just enough I suspect—to win, there really is no going back from the campaigns over the past two years.  The choice is between the visionary ambiguities of the Yes campaign and the equally ambiguous pragmatism of those calling for retention of the Union.  Given what most accept will be the closeness of the result, you have to ask what its democratic legitimacy will be.  What the referendum has done is to expose a fundamental ideological fissure within Scottish society that will, despite the weasel words from both sides, be difficult to heal.  I can’t see the two sides coming together in the immediate aftermath of the result however good natured the debate has generally been.

So, the referendum result may not be the end of the matter.  There are some who argue that, if the result favours independence, the rest of the UK should have a referendum on whether or not to accept the negotiated solution.  Now there is an argument for this especially as Scotland makes up less than 10 per cent of the total population of the UK and the result, whatever it is, affects all peoples in the UK.  Why, some have already asked, should Scotland be given special status and advantages over the other constituent parts of the UK?  The problem with a divorce is that, while the decision may be easy to make, working out the details of the split is always contentious and time-consuming.  I can’t see that being achieved by March 2016.  While the focus has been on whether there should be a monetary union between Scotland and the rest of the UK and what Scotland’s status will be in the European Union and NATO and what happens to Trident have long been the focus of debate, these are as nothing to untangling three centuries of Union.  The negotiations will be political horse-trading—you let me have X and you can have Y—they always are. Pragmatic politics almost always trumps political vision—remember that politics is the art of the possible.

Whatever happens in Scotland, constitutional reform is now inevitable

Whether Scotland votes for or against independence on Thursday, the constitutional genie is now out of the bottle.  If Scotland votes for independence, the West Lothian question will not longer apply as there will no longer be any Scottish MPs in Westminster but if it’s a no vote and further powers are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, it remains unresolved.  What the Scottish debate has highlighted is the increasing disenchantment of the public with Westminster politicians and the need for fundamental constitutional change.

The problem lies in the existing unitary constitution.  Although there have been constitutional crises over the last thousand years—the reform crisis of 1830-1832 and the crisis between Commons and Lords between 1909 and 1911—there has only been one truly revolutionary moment—the English Republic between 1649 and 1660.  It is evolution rather than revolution that has been the primary feature of our constitutional structures and the problem with evolution is that it can look like tinkering with things or cosmetic change.  The British state evolved over a thousand years from the separate Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into the centralised English state that then by a process of coercion, conquest and often disreputable ‘persuasion’, in to the United Kingdom.  More and more power has been concentrated in Westminster and, until the acceptance that devolution was a necessary development, it jealously guarded and maintained that power.  Devolution has led to this unravelling.  The unitary constitution, if not already dead, is in terminal decline.

So where constitutionally does this leave the United Kingdom?  The question of an English Parliament  has recently been revived as one solution to the problem—English MPs for English issues.  But is again tinkering…it fails to address the critical issue that what Britain needs is a federal system of government in which its constituent parts are responsible for governing themselves while the federal authorities are responsible for issues such as defence—so small federal government and bigger regional government bringing power closer to the people, a shift from representative to participatory democracy.

Book review--Chartism: Rise and Demise

Chartism: Rise and Demise, Richard Brown, Authoring History, paperback, 2014, ISBN 9781495390340

Chartism, the mass petitioning movement for universal male suffrage, conveniently punctuated with intense bursts of activity around its three national petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848, appears deceptively familiar to many students. These three fairly distinctive phases of the movement, have readily promoted analytical narrative approaches from R.G. Gammage, via Mark Hovell, J.T. Ward and Malcolm Chase, which have been supplemented by more thematic explorations of other aspects of the movement by a host of prominent historians who have focused on the roles of the government and public order (F.C. Mather); women and the family (David Jones and Dorothy Thompson) and individuals like Feargus O’Connor (Donald Read, Eric Glasgow and James Epstein) and Ernest Jones (Miles Taylor). Richard Brown, in a richly nuanced approach, deftly weaves into his narrative, which broadly follows the conventionally phased structure, discussion of these and many other themes. He explains, for example, how cultural dimensions of the movement though often divisive helped to sustain its momentum in the late 1830s and 1840s and indeed beyond. He also provides a more explicitly historiographical perspective than Malcolm Chase, which students will find particularly helpful, and takes a generally more sympathetic view of O’Connor than some other recent writers, recognising the Chartist leader’s failings, but attributing the successful development of the mass platform which underpinned the movement largely to his abilities as a platform speaker.

Brown’s three-volume review of Chartism, of which this is the second volume, is based predominantly but not exclusively on the undiminishing secondary literature of the movement, supplemented by some pertinent references to contemporary newspapers and archival evidence where appropriate to offer fresh insights into the movement. Brown readily acknowledges his debt to previous writers in the field commenting that Chartism has been exceptionally rewarded by ‘so many good historians who have taken up the Chartist mantle and whose innovative thinking has made the subject so popular’. Succinctly encapsulated within the title Chartism: Rise and Demise Brown’s aim is to give ‘greater attention to the radical context in which Chartism developed’ explaining why it emerged as a widespread political movement in the late 1830s and how it peaked reaching ‘a high water mark of active local and popular support’ in the strikes of 1842, which he suggests have been effectively airbrushed from the narrative of Chartism by some historians. He considers other hitherto neglected aspects of the final phase of the movement such as the Land Plan, commending the subscription lists as an invaluable source for the later history of the movement; the significance of the events of 1848 offering a revisionist view of so-called ‘fiasco’ interpretations; and exploring the movement’s links with socialism and its global impact. One of the most distinctive features of the book is Brown’s facility for drawing apt comparisons with international parallels, for example, he locates the depression that affected Britain after 1837 within ‘a broader crisis within North American and European economies’; notices parallels between tithings in Wales and hunters’ lodges in Canada in 1838-39 and makes comparisons between the Newport rising with the attack on Harper’s Ferry, twenty years later during the anti-slavery campaign in the United States.

Brown’s revised synthesis now constitutes the most up-to-date, detailed and wide-ranging of any overview of the movement produced for the general reader and will be an invaluable aid to students in tertiary and higher education engaging initially with Chartist history in all its complexity. No prior knowledge is assumed and Brown includes lucid explanations of such basic features of the movement as the origins and terms of the People’s Charter. Chartism remains one of the most stimulating and rigorously probed areas of historical enquiry, as enticing now as when I was first introduced to research into the movement under the guidance of the late Professor F.C. Mather many of whose informed, judicious assessments of the movement emerge from Brown’s analysis with continuing plausibility. Indeed, Brown concludes that Chartism was ultimately defeated not only by its own inner weaknesses but also by effective government control with the authorities in 1848 inflicting ‘a most damaging psychological defeat on the most significant, populist, radical movement of the century bankrupting the long tradition of the mass platform’.

John A. Hargreaves

So yes means yes and no means yes as well!!

What is evident from the populist debate on Scottish independence is that David Cameron is probably rueing the day that he said no to ‘devo-max’ when he had the opportunity.  The result is that the debate is not over whether Scotland should be given what is effectively Home Rule—probably what most people wanted even some in the SNP—but on whether or not the country should secede from the Union.  The response from Westminster has been the hastily presented proposals made initially on Sunday and firmed up in the following two days…not a panic response according to No campaigners but, when a demonstrator ironically yelled ‘Don’t Panic’ as David Cameron left his emotionally charged f…ing meeting in Edinburgh, he was undoubtedly right.  By not including ‘devo-max’ as the third question in  the referendum, those unhappy with the status quo find themselves with only one option…voting for independence and belatedly making promises and a timetable for greater powers to Scotland may not be sufficient to alter the seemingly inexorable stampede to the constitutional door.

The reality is that most people in the United Kingdom do not wish to see the break-up of the Union—and probably a majority in Scotland—but such is the opprobrium in which Westminster politicians are held, it is a real option.  And even if Scotland votes ‘No’, the constitutional genie is out of the bottle.  Why, people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland ask, should Scotland be given extensive powers to rule itself but not us?  Such is the remoteness of politicians in London from the lives and aspirations of ordinary people that there will be demands for greater regional autonomy within the Union—power needs to be brought closer to the people if our democratic system is to retain popular support.  Unitary constitutional systems ultimately unravel when faced with demands for devolution; in fact, I would go further and argue that unitary structures are incompatible with devolution.  What we need is a United States of Great Britain and Northern Island within the EU…in reality the only solution to the current constitutional impasse.  This recognises that there are supra-national priorities, while some things, such as defence and fiscal policy, that are best done at the level of the state; others things, such as education—this is already the case—that are best organised on a national basis; while others should be regional and local…what is essentially a federal constitutional network.   It works in other countries, such as Germany, and there’s no reason why it should not work here. 

Now I’m certain there will be many politicians and civil servants in London who will argue that we don’t need to move away from the unitary system that has served us well—debatable—for so long.  This, of course, neglects the evolutionary way in which the constitution has developed over past centuries despite the warnings from those keen to preserve their own power or the status quo bleating that change will be a disaster—and for them perhaps it was.  The question is whether the British Constitution is ‘fit for purpose’ in the twenty-first century and clearly it is not as the response to the independence debate has made very clear.  Whether it’s yes or no next week, radical constitutional change is now inevitable.

Norfolk Island: Rebellion in 1834

Convict rebellions were a feature of Norfolk Island almost from its foundation but their incidence intensified after 1825. In September 1826, an attempt was made by convicts to escape from the island by boat, having been told that there was an island within a hundred miles where they could safely hide and never be found. While most of the soldiers were chasing two absconders, about thirty prisoners seized and bound their overseers, robbed the Stores for provisions and weapons and put three boats to sea, killing a soldier. The commandant, Captain Vance Young Donaldson and soldiers followed them to the nearby small and uninhabited Phillip Island, where they were captured. The ringleaders were sent to Sydney for trial, where they were sentenced to death. [1]

Lieutenant-Colonel James Thomas Morisset was appointed commandant of Norfolk Island in 1829. [2] During his period in office, the convict population grew from about 200 to over 700 by 1832 and there were several attempts at rebellion that were strenuously suppressed. Governor Darling was supportive of Morisset, regarding him ‘a very Zealous Officer’ whose duties were of ‘a most arduous nature’ observing that ‘the Conduct of the Prisoners has of late been outrageous in the extreme, having repeatedly avowed...to Murder every one employed at the Settlement, and it is only by the utmost vigilance that they have been prevented accomplishing their object.’ [3] There was, however, growing criticism of Morisset’s rule within the more radical sections of NSW society. In 1832, Edward Hall, editor of the Sydney Gazette, wrote that the convicts on Norfolk Island had been ‘made the prey of hunger and nakedness at the caprice of monsters in human form...and cut to pieces by the scourge...have no redress or the least enquiry made into their suffering’. [4]

By the beginning of 1834, there were widespread rumours of rebellion across the island. [5] According to a convict named Laurence Frayne, Morisset was about to flog confessions out of the convicts, as the Reverend Samuel Marsden had done to Irish convicts thirty years earlier. Morisset was increasingly incapacitated by a head wound he had received during the Peninsular War in 1811 and had already decided to sell his commission. In practice, the running of the island was devolved to his second-in-command, Captain Foster Fyans. [6] Fyans was an experienced officer having served in Portugal and Spain between 1811 and 1814 and in India and Mauritius from 1818 until he arrived in Sydney in 1833. He was firm but fair in his attitude to convicts and later wrote of his experience as commandant of the Moreton Bay penal colony:

Five hundred convicts on this establishment were well and usefully employed; there was none of that lurking feeling in the men, and I may add that the settlement appeared to me not unlike a free overgrown establishment...I was always of opinion that mitigation to the deserving tended to good, and feel not sorry to acknowledge that I was instrumental to mitigating to a great extent seventy convicts, and well pleased often I have been in meeting some of these men doing well in the world as respectable citizens, and only in one solitary instance I failed in my hope. [7]

However, his view of Norfolk Island was emphatic: ‘to the latest hour [it] was a disgrace to England...the true discipline of the penal settlement subverted.’

Fyans was right to be concerned as an anonymous note, left in the soldiers’ barracks warned them to ‘beware of poison’. He had clear memories of a plot hatched by fifteen convicts two years before on the Governor Phillip to poison the ship’s company with arsenic in their food on the voyage to Norfolk Island. Fortunately this attempt was prevented by one of his fellow prisoners turning informer. Fyans was especially concerned by John Knatchbull in whose cabin a pound of arsenic was found though neither he nor the other convicts were charged. [8] Knatchbull came from a privileged landed background, the son of Sir Edward Knatchbull and his second wife. Educated at Winchester School, he had volunteered for the navy in 1804 becoming a lieutenant in 1810 and retiring on full-pay after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. [9] The Admiralty stopped his pay in 1818 because of a debt he incurred in the Azores. Convicted of stealing with force and arms in 1824, he was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years and arrived in NSW in April 1825. Initially, he adapted well to the colonial environment and was given his ticket-of-leave in 1829. However, two years later, he was successfully prosecuted for forgery but his death sentence was commuted to transportation for seven years to Norfolk Island where he arrived on the Governor Phillip in late 1832. [10] Knatchbull was central to the rebellion as the only way off the island was by ship and claimed that although he was unable to take part, he had offered to command a ship to South America if one could be captured.

On 1 August 1833, Knatchbull, George Farrell and Dominick McCoy agreed on a complex plan. First, it linked the convicts in the lumberyard and sawpits to those at the lime-burners’ kiln and the stone quarry and called for a simultaneous rebellion. At the dawn muster in the convict barracks yard, they would rush Fyans and his soldiers and overpower them.  If any of the guard managed to barricade themselves in the guardhouse, the prisoners would set fire to it and flush them out. Meanwhile the gaol gang, made up of prisoners under special punishment, would also rush their own guard as they were being mustered for work in the stone quarry. Secondly, the rebels would seize the apparatus of colonial rule. The two columns of convicts would then advance on Government House and capture Morisset, seize the 18-pound cannon there and turn it on the military barracks. If the soldiers surrendered they would be spared; if not, they would hang with the hated convict constables, overseers and informers. Finally, the convicts would escape from the island. They would force Morisset to hand over his codebook of signals, so that they could flag false messages to the next ship to anchor off the reef. They would get on board by wearing the overseers’ blue jackets and seize the vessel that Knatchbull would pilot to America, for ‘if he once got there, the Americans would not allow them to be given up again.’ In the months between the formulation of the plan and the rebellion, Redmond Moss successfully carried messages between the different gangs.

Shortly after 5 am on Wednesday 15 January 1834, men in the military barracks heard a ragged volley of musket fire. The rebellion had begun. At the dawn muster in the prisoners’ barracks thirty-eight men, an unusually large number, had reported sick and were marched off to hospital by John Higgins, a warder. Once inside the hospital lockup, they overpowered Higgins and locked him in a sickroom. The prisoners struck off each other’s irons, burst into the wards and armed themselves with weapons ranging from chair legs to scalpels and a poker. Some even found axes. They massed in the entrance of the hospital in silence, ready to fall on the guard when it came by. A hundred yards away this guard was mustering the gaol gang, about thirty convicts under the eye of a corporal and twelve privates of the 4th King’s Own Regiment. The guard corporal ordered the prisoners to march, but they would not budge. They stood there, rattling their chains. The signal was given. At that moment, Frayne looked toward the sawpits and cried, ‘Are you ready?’ Seconds later, forty convicts from the sawpits attacked the guards from behind, while the hospital gang burst from hiding and attacked their front. Taken completely by surprise, the soldiers could not get their weapons to their shoulders. The convicts ‘were within the bayonets of the Guard, before they were aware of them’ and for a few moments the convicts and guards locked, grappling for their guns. After a brief melee, military discipline prevailed and the guards now began firing as they backed into the gateway of the gaol, frantically loading and firing while their comrades kept the lunging convicts back at sabre-point. Several convicts, including Henry Drummond, one of the ringleaders went down and, as suddenly as it began, the fracas broke up.

Half a mile away in Quality Row, where the barracks and officers’ houses stood, Foster Fyans and his reacted quickly to the situation. They double-timed down the road to intercept the mutineers and when they charged again. Fyans gave the order to fire and, when the black-powder smoke cleared fifteen rebels were stretched on the ground while most of the others had plunged into the sugar cane that grew beside the road. Only the remnants of the gaol gang, hampered by their irons stood dumbly in surrender. Soldiers followed the escapees into the vegetable gardens and sugar cane. Fyans then led a detachment up the hill to deal with the convicts at the agricultural station at Longridge. They had lookouts where they could see the Kingston gaol buildings and signal the start of the mutiny. Convicts crowded exultantly around and Walter Bourke, their leader smashed the lock on the main tool chest and started passing out axes and pitchforks to the men. Crying ‘Liberty or Death!’ about eighty convicts followed him down the road to Flagstaff Hill. They expected to see a victorious crowd of fellow rebels surging to meet them. Instead they saw two men stumbling up the hill, one of them wounded pursued by redcoats. The soldiers fired a few rounds at the rebels, but the range was too great. Soon, they closed in and beat the rebels back to Longridge, taking twenty-eight prisoners on the way. With difficulty, Fyans kept the soldiers from bayoneting them to death on the spot, but felt later that ‘perhaps such lenity is ill bestowed’. Within a couple of hours, all the Longridge rebels were subdued and bound together with rope in a line, the soldiers marched them down the hill to Kingston.

By noon, Fyans had the mutineers confined in the main prison barracks, ‘nearly one thousand Ruffians’, he wrote later. A few were still missing, among them Robert Douglas, who was found later on the other side of the island at Anson’s Bay, still carrying a musket with ninety rounds of ammunition wrapped in a palm leaf. A bayonet thrust had destroyed his left eye and infection blinded the other a few days later. Fyans interrogated him daily in the hospital, but Douglas refused to say anything about the rebellion. The final tally of casualties was nine rebels dead and about fifty wounded.  No guard was killed until the night of 17 January, when two military search parties met in a cornfield while looking for rebels still at large and, each believing the other to be convicts, opened fire. One fluke shot killed both a civilian constable and Thomas York a young private of the 4th Regiment.

Captain Fyans adopted harsh measures against the rebels. It took blacksmiths nine days to make new irons for the prisoners. Rebels locked in the gaol awaiting trial were kept naked in a yard so crowded that not a third of them could sit at a time. For the next five months, while the reports went back to Sydney and arrangements were being made to send a judge to Norfolk Island, the rebels were kept locked to a chain cable. Mass floggings went on into the evening, until the ‘desperate lawless and listless mob’ had been scourged into submission. Some convicts, weary of their ‘acute and intolerable sufferings’ planned to commit group suicide, but never put their plan into action. It took Fyans and his staff five months to interrogate all the witnesses and take their depositions for trial. In this, Fyans was supported from March 1834 by Joseph Anderson, the new commandant of the island. Of those charged with mutiny, half were lifers and another third had sentences of fourteen years. In the course of the rebellion’s suppression, Knatchbull turned informer. 162 rebels were charged but the Attorney-General ruled that only 59 should be tried. The trials took place on Norfolk Island in July and twenty-nine rebels were sentenced to death. [11] Thirteen were eventually executed in front of their fellows on 22 and 23 September.

Lithograph on paper, 1844, artist unknown

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

After the trials, Judge Sir William Burton severely reprimanded Fyans:

Most improperly, Sir, did you act as a magistrate, in accepting a confession from Knatchbull; neither should any deposition have been taken from him. Throughout the trials his name has been connected in every case: he was the chief of the mutineers, the man you should have named first in the Calendar. You have saved his life, or prolonged it. He never can do good.

Fyans blamed himself for saving Knatchbull’s neck by accepting his depositions and ‘for so gross an act, in setting this monster loose on society.’ Burton was proved right. Knatchbull returned from Norfolk Island in May 1839 [12] and gained his second ticket-of-leave in July 1842 but was hanged early in 1844 for the murder of Ellen Jamieson, a shopkeeper. [13] There had been little surprise at the outcome of his trial since he had been caught red-handed with £17 taken from the victim and the public called for the rope. Defended by Robert Lowe, later British Home Secretary, the trial was not delayed by Lowe’s attempt to get an adjournment to seek medical opinion on Knatchbull’s sanity. Since Lowe could not offer a defence questioning what happened, he chose to argue a novel case for moral insanity. [14] This was rejected both by Judge Burton and the jury that found him guilty, a verdict widely supported in the press and by the public. [15] His execution on 13 February 1844 was attended by at least 5,000 people with The Australian putting the figure at double that amount. [16]

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[1] HRA, Series I: Vol. 15, pp. 596-597.

[2] Parsons, Vivienne, ‘Morisset, James Thomas (1780-1852)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 260-261. See, Huskisson to Darling, 19 May 1828, HRA, Series I: Vol. 14, pp. 192-193, and Darling to Sir George Murray, 12 February 1829, HRA, Series I: Vol. 14, pp. 641-642.

[3] Darling to Goderich, 26 August 1831, HRA, Series I: Vol. 16, p. 339

[4] Sydney Gazette, 4 December 1832.

[5] Kercher, Bruce, Outsiders: tales from the Supreme Court of NSW, 1824-1836, (Australian Scholarly Publishing), 2006, pp. 109-124 considers violence on Norfolk Island. R v. Douglas and others, Supreme Court of NSW, July 1834, printed in Sydney Gazette, 13, 20, 27 September, 1834, provides the detail, http://www.law.mq.edu.au/scnsw/Cases1834/html/r_v_douglas_and_others__1834.htm

[6] Brown, P. L., ‘Fyans, Foster (1790-1870)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 422-424. See also, Memoirs recorded at Geelong, Victoria, Australia by Captain Foster Fyans, 1790-1870: transcribed from his holograph manuscript given by descendants to the State Library, Melbourne 1962, (Geelong Advertiser), 1986.

[7] Cit, ibid, Brown, P. L., ‘Fyans, Foster (1790-1870)’, p. 424.

[8] Sydney Gazette, 4 December 1832, detailed the ‘diabolical conspiracy’.

[9] ‘Knatchbull, John (1792?-1844)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 65-66, and Knatchbull, John, Life of John Knatchbull. Written by Himself, 23rd January-13th February, 1844, in Darlinghurst Gaol, first pub., Roderick, Colin, (ed.), John Knatchbull from Quarterdeck to Gallows, (Angus and Robertson), 1963.

[10] See, ‘Diabolical Conspiracy to murder the crew and guard of the Governor Philip transport on her passage to Norfolk Island’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 4 December 1832, and the report in Hobart Town Courier, 4 January 1833.

[11] The trial of the rebels, R v. Douglas and others, Supreme Court of NSW, July 1834, printed in Sydney Gazette, 13, 20, 27 September, 1834. The Sydney Herald and Australian gave no formal reports of these trials, although the Australian listed them on 22 August 1834.  The Sydney Herald reported the second to seventh trials on 27 September 1834. Bourke to Spring Rice, 15 January 1835, HRA, Series I: Vol. 17, pp. 638-639, provides the only ‘official’ discussion of the rebellion and trials.

[12] By 1839, fifteen years had elapsed since his initial sentence and Knatchbull assumed that his absolute pardon would follow when he wrote a most eloquent petition informing Governor Gipps after his return from Norfolk Island. His hopes were dashed by the note the Barracks clerk, Thomas Ryan, penned on the back of the document, repeating the unproven claim that Knatchbull had tried to poison the ship’s crew on the Governor Phillip. Ryan also drew the governor’s attention to the regulation that recommended a colonial conviction should not be served concurrently but be added to the original sentence. Rather than being released, Knatchbull was re-transported to Port Macquarie

[13] See, NSW State Archives, Supreme Court: Police report on John Knatchbull, 1844, 9/6329, No. 135.

[14] Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1844. See also, ‘Mental Epidemics’, The Australian, 1 February 1844, and ‘Monomania’, Sydney Morning Chronicle, 3 February 1844. The debate over Lowe’s novel defence continued after the execution, see Morning Chronicle, 8 June 1844,

[15] On R v. Knatchbull and the defence of ‘moral insanity’, see Woods, Gregory D., A history of criminal law in New South Wales: the colonial period 1788-1900, (Federation Press), 2002, pp. 159-162.

[16] The execution was reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 1844, and The Australian, 15 February 1844.

Is the logic of devolution independence?

With less than two weeks to the referendum on Scotland’s independence, a recent poll suggests, for the first time, that the Yes campaign is winning the argument—albeit a poll than did not include those who remain undecided or who do not intend to vote.  Should this come as a surprise?  I think not.  The No campaign, though working hard to get its message across, lacks the charismatic appeal of those campaigning for independence.  Individuals such as Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, though undoubtedly ‘big’ political beasts, do not have the same populist clout as Alec Salmon and Nicola Sturgeon.  Gordon Brown may be right when he suggests that the Better Together camp was finding it ‘difficult’ to win over Scots because of anger over coalition policies including changes to housing benefit and tax cuts for the wealthy but there also appears to have been a haemorrhage of Labour supporters to the No campaign as well. 

One critical problem for those calling for Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom is that the logic of devolution in a unitary constitutional system is independence.  Devolution only satisfies some of the aspirations of those areas given devolved powers, so you give the areas more devolved powers but in a unitary system you can only go so far.  What those who originally thought constitutional devolution was a way of satisfying calls for greater regional control over their own affairs either failed to recognise or recognised but ignored that while devolution within a federal system might  stem demands for independence, in a unitary system it would not.  If Scotland votes for independence on 18 September, one of the reasons why this will occur is that politicians who gave devolved powers to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland failed to then abandon the unitary constitution and establish a federal constitutional system.  Arguing for ‘Better Together’ and at the same time saying that if there was a ‘no’ vote, further powers would be devolved to the Scottish Parliament demonstrates the weakness of the unitary Unionist case in an increasing devolved political environment.  The logic of devolution need not be independence but it is more rather than less likely if you then retain a unitary constitutional structure.

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1780-1945

JUST PUBLISHED

Although it’s only two years since I produced Sex, Work and Politics, writing a second edition has allowed me to extend its chronological limits back to the 1780s and forward to the end of the Second World War in 1945. The original structure of the book remains unaltered though each chapter has been remodelled to take account of this change and of research published since early 2012. In particular, I have made wider use of contemporary newspapers to position women more firmly within their varied milieus. I have also added two new chapters that consider the role played by women after they received the vote in 1918 and 1928 and the place of women in Britain’s imperial project after 1780.

The first chapter considers the relationship between different approaches that have evolved to explain the role of women in history. This is followed by a chapter that looks at the ways in which women were represented in the nineteenth century in terms of the female body, sexuality and the notion of ‘separate spheres‘. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between women and work and how that relationship developed. For working-class women, the critical issue was their increasing economic marginalisation as the result of the masculinisation of work through control over technology, opposition to women’s role in the key sectors of the economy and the identification of certain types of work as specifically ‘female’. For middle-class women caught in the tightening vice of ‘surplus numbers’, the problem was that growing numbers of especially single women needed to find employment to maintain their social position but who often lacked the education necessary to do so. The growing professionalisation of women’s work with the emergence of teaching and nursing and the assault on the male preserve in medicine and the law was the critical development for the middle-classes.

Although women’s suffrage has had a symbolic importance for generations of feminists, the campaign for the vote has obscured the broader agitations for women’s rights during the nineteenth century and was, in terms of its impact before 1914, far less significant. Before the 1880s, the focus was not on winning the vote and the demand for parliamentary suffrage was only one of a range of campaigns. Between 1850 and 1880, a number of significant battles were fought and won. Some of these sought access to the public sphere in education, the professions and central and local government. Others aimed to improve women’s legal and economic status within marriage. Married women’s property rights, divorce, custody of children, domestic violence as well as prostitution were all significant areas in which Victorian middle-class feminists campaigned for changes in the male-oriented status of the law and the differing moral standards to which wives and husbands were expected to conform. This was particular evident in the successful campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts from the mid-1860s and in the growing significance of girls’ schooling and the campaign for higher education, issues are examined in Chapter 4.

The following two chapters look at the ways in which women actively sought access to the public sphere through political activity and demands for suffrage reform. Women’s interest in securing access to political rights was not limited to the campaign for parliamentary suffrage and from the eighteenth century women—proto-feminists--had been challenging the patriarchy. Women, from working- and middle-classes were involved in political protest such as the Chartist movement and in campaigns against slavery and the Corn Laws. The growing powers given to various levels of local government also attracted their keen interest and in the arena of local party politics women were to play a prominent role as early as the 1870s. For some women, suffrage was not the central issue and, those women who supported the Fabian Society were more concerned with improving the economic status of women as a necessary precursor to gaining the vote. Although there had been calls for women’s suffrage from the early nineteenth century and especially after 1832, it was not until the mid-1860s that campaigns outside Parliament sought to influence and pressurise MPs to introduce suffrage reform. There may have been support within both Conservative and Liberal Parties for women’s suffrage but it was not seen as a priority by party leaders and had to rely on individual MPs being willing to introduce bills, all of which were defeated. After thirty years of intermittent campaigning, the suffrage organisations had not achieved any change in the franchise.

It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the suffrage movement achieved widespread national recognition largely through the activities of the militant Suffragettes led by the controlling Pankhursts and the non-militant campaigning of the Suffragists. These wings of the suffrage movement agreed about ends but disagreed about some of the means used to achieve those ends: it was a question of deeds or words. The nature of the suffrage campaign is considered in Chapter 7 while reactions to this from anti-suffragists and political parties form the core of Chapter 8. The impact of the First World War on women generally and the suffrage campaign in particular is discussed in Chapter 9. The critical question is whether women gained the vote in 1918 as a reward for their services during the war or whether it was a political imperative that could no longer be reasonably resisted. Chapter 10 considers the role played by women after they gained the vote in 1918 through to the end of the Second World War. Many women emigrated, either on their own or as part of families, to Britain’s growing colonial possessions after 1780. Chapter 11 examines the nature of their role in the development of these colonies. The book ends with an examination of the notion of ‘borderlands’ as a conceptual framework for discussing women in Britain between 1780 and 1945 and the ways in which their personal, ideological, economic, legal and political status developed and changed.

‘Hell in Paradise’

The ways in which Norfolk Island was regarded in the nineteenth century have led to stories to be told that do not correspond to its reality. The Norfolk Island legend has several defining characteristics that include assumptions that the prisoners were universally brutalised and had no hope, that commandants and their subordinates were sadists, sexual violence was widespread, and that ‘unnatural crimes’–Victorian shorthand for homosexuality–were rampant.

During Norfolk Island’s second settlement between 1825 and 1855, it was indeed the ‘Hell of the Pacific’, a place dominated by death and despair. [1] In 1824, the Governor of NSW, Sir Thomas Brisbane, [2] received a directive from Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary that Norfolk Island was again to be turned into a penitentiary. [3] Its remoteness, seen previously as a disadvantage, was now viewed as an asset for the detention of those ‘twice-convicted’, men who had committed further crimes since arriving in NSW and VDL. Brisbane decided that it was the best place to send the worst felons ‘forever to be excluded from all hope of return’. Norfolk Island would be ‘the nec plus ultra of Convict degradation’.[4]

His successor, Governor Ralph Darling, [5] was even more severe than Brisbane, and made it clear in 1827 that he wished that ‘every man should be worked in irons that the example may deter others from the commission of crime’ [6] and that ‘My object was to hold out [Norfolk Island] as a place of the extremest punishment short of death’. [7] Governor George Arthur, in VDL, also believed that ‘when prisoners are sent to Norfolk Island, they should on no account be permitted to return. Transportation thither should be considered as the ultimate limit and a punishment short only of death’. Sir Richard Bourke instructed Major Joseph Anderson, the notorious Commandant of Norfolk Island from 1834 to 1839, to keep prisoners working manually in irons even though it was expensive and inefficient, as the penal settlement was considered a place of punishment. He deliberately warned him against implementing any more efficient methods of production, such as mills that were not ‘urged by the labour of convicts’. [8] Despite the reliance on manual labour, prisoners on Norfolk Island were cheaper to keep than chained convicts in NSW and the existence of the place at all was considered by many in Britain to be part of the ‘moral cost’ of the transportation system. Convicts so feared Norfolk Island that Elliott one of the prisoners declared that he would rather hang than be sent there. [9] The Norfolk Island penal settlement was not primarily for the reformation of convicts.

Conditions for convicts, many of them Irish Catholics, were unrelentingly brutal. A large percentage of the convicts were sentenced to remain in heavy chains for the terms of their natural lives and most convicts were chained during the day. Convicts were used primarily as farm labourers or in building much of what today is Kingston. Stone was quarried for building from Nepean Island, a rock close to shore and coral rubble was rendered with lime and sand. Norfolk Pine was used for joinery and roofs and floors were made from thin stone slabs. Flogging was common, sometimes up to 500 strokes. Dumb-cells were constructed to exclude light and sound in which some lost their sanity. Solitary confinement, increased workloads and decreased rations were also common forms of punishment. Michael Burns, for instance, suffered a total of 2,210 lashes and almost two years in confinement, much of it in solitary with at least six months of those two years on a diet of bread and water. His crimes were insolence, suspected robbery and neglect of work, striking a fellow prisoner, bushranging, singing a song, calling for a doctor, attempted escape and inability to work caused by his punishments.[10] Thomas Bunbury, briefly commandant in 1839 after the brief mutiny by the 80th Regiment on the island, [11] wrote that he could not understand why ‘a villain who has been guilty of every enormity, should feel shame at having his back scratched with the cat-o-nine-tails when he felt none for his atrocious crimes’ and that ‘if a man is too sick to work he is too sick to eat’. [12]

Such was the harshness of both hard labour and punishment that for some death was preferable to continued torment though contemporary evidence for this is limited. When Father William Ullathorne, Vicar general of Sydney, visited Norfolk Island to comfort those due for execution after the 1834 rebellion, he found it ‘the most heartrending scene that I ever witnessed’. Having the duty of informing the prisoners as to who was reprieved and who was to die, he was shocked to record as ‘a literal fact that each man who heard his reprieve wept bitterly, and that each man who heard of his condemnation to death went down on his knees with dry eyes, and thanked God.’ [13] John Frederick Mortlock, who wrote about his own treatment at various settlements around Australia and arrived on Norfolk Island in 1845, explained:

…instead of awakening moral responsibility, it [injudicious severity] strengthens the Devil, and makes men more difficult to manage–more likely to be dangerous when restored to society. [14]

There is evidence that some men committed capital offences with ‘suicidal intent’ so that they would be executed. For instance, William Westwood, one of the leaders of the 1846 riot suggested in a conversation with Stipendiary Magistrate Samuel Barrow that he ‘became careless and reckless of life’ and that ‘the death I am going to suffer could be preferable to Norfolk Island.’ [15] However, an attempted escape from gaol suggests that his claims should be treated with some scepticism. These incidents were embellished into stories of ‘suicide lotteries’ by some contemporary writers. John West, for instance, argued that men at Macquarie Harbour ‘gambled for life’. [16] The Norfolk Island suicide lottery myth relies on an extremely limited number of sources and despite the continued currency of these tales, the suicide rate on the Island was extremely low with only three recorded attempted suicides, a consequence Causer argues ‘that convicts were averse to suicide for explicitly religious reasons’. [17]

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[1] See, Nobbs, R., (ed.), Norfolk Island and its Second Settlement, 1825-1855, (Library of Australian History), 1991.

[2] Heydon, J. D., ‘Brisbane, Sir Thomas Makdougall (1773-1860)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 151-155, and Brisbane, Sir Thomas Makdougall, Reminiscences of General Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, (T. Constable), 1860, pp. 43-60.

[3] Bathurst to Brisbane, 22 July 1824, HRA, Series I: Vol. 11, pp. 321-322, acknowledged by Brisbane, 21 May 1825.

[4] Brisbane to Under-Secretary Horton, 24 March 1825, HRA, Series I: Vol. 11, p. 553.

[5] ‘Sir Ralph Darling (1772-1858), ADB, Vol. 1, 1966, pp. 282-286, and ibid, Fletcher, Brian, Ralph Darling: A Governor Maligned, provide biographical material.

[6] Darling to Under-Secretary Hay, 10 February 1827, HRA, Series I: Vol. 13, p. 106.

[7] Cit, ibid, Hazzard, Margaret, Punishment Short of Death, p. 111.

[8] See, Bourke to Stanley, 15 January 1834, HRA, Series I: Vol. 17, pp. 319-320, 327-328.

[9] R. v. Jones, Giles and Elliot: report of execution, Australian, 13 September 1833. For other declarations of preference for death over transportation to Norfolk Island, see R v Gough, Watson and Muir, 1827, Therry, R., Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria: with a supplementary chapter on transportation and the ticket-of-leave system, (Sampson Low, Son, and Co.), 1863, pp. 19, 24, and R v Pegg, 1831, who preferred death to 14 years’ transportation.

[10] Cook, Thomas, The exile’s lamentations or biographical sketch of Thomas Cook who was convicted at the Assizes held at Shrewsbury in March 1831 for ‘writing threatening letters’ and sentenced 14 yrs transportation and re-convicted for forgery and sentenced to Norfolk Island for life, 1840, reprinted, (Library of Australian History), 1978, p. 48.

[11] Sargent, Clem, ‘The British Garrison in Australia 1788-1841: the mutiny of the 80th Regiment on Norfolk Island’, Sabretache, Vol. 59, (3), (2005), pp. 5-22, is essential on this neglected rebellion.

[12] Bunbury, Thomas, Reminiscences of a Veteran: being personal and military adventures in Portugal, Spain, France, Malta, New South Wales, Norfolk Island, New Zealand, Andaman Islands, and India, 3 Vols. (C.J. Skeet), 1861, reprinted (N & M Press), 2009, cit. ibid, Hazzard, Margaret, Punishment Short of Death, p. 152

[13] Cit, Birt, Henry Norbert, Benedictine Pioneers in Australia, 2 Vols. (Herbert & Daniel), Vol. 1, 1911, p. 178, and Butler, Edward Cuthbert, The life & times of Bishop Ullathorne, 1806-1889, 2 Vols. (Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, Ltd.), 1926, Vol. 1, p. 94.

[14] Mortlock, J. F., Experiences of a convict transported for twenty one years: an autobiographical memoir, (Richard Barrett, Printers), 1864, p. 67.

[15] Barrow to Comptroller-General of Convicts 2 November 1846, cit, Causer, Tim, ‘Norfolk Island’s ‘suicide lotteries’: myth and reality’, unpublished paper, p. 5. http://www.academia.edu/1109987/Norfolk_Islands_suicide_lotteries_myth_and_reality

[16] Ibid, West, John, The History of Tasmania, p. 397.

[17] Causer, Tim, ‘Norfolk Island’s ‘suicide lotteries’: myth and reality’, unpublished paper, pp. 5-6.

Rebellion on Norfolk Island: Foveaux and rebellion in 1800

There had been attempted convict rebellions in 1789 and 1794 and this situation intensified with the arrival on the island in early November 1800 of a group of United Irish prisoners, several of whom had been implicated in conspiracies in Sydney in September and October. Although Foveaux was aware of the need for surveillance over the convicts, he believed that lenient treatment and the isolation of the island would discourage any attempts at escape. The United Irishmen were allowed free association with each other and with earlier arrivals. In particular, Farrell Cuffe, a school teacher and United Irishman from County Offaly struck up or possibly renewed a friendship with Peter McLean, a forty-year old political prisoner from County Cavan who had arrived with Joseph Foveaux, who King had appointed commandant of the Island, in July. The result was preparations for an armed escape. Convicts began making pikes and Cockerton Ross, an expiree, promised to give them 15 muskets. McLean was also in correspondence with Thomas Pyshe Palmer in Sydney who promised that a ship would come to take them away once the conspirators had seized the settlement. [1]

The tiny settlement on the south side of Norfolk Island – a view drawn by Edward Dayes based on a painting by William Chapman storekeeper and deputy commissary

The rebellion was originally planned for Christmas Day when McLean and sympathetic soldiers would open the barracks and the rebels would seize weapons and proceed to the guardhouse, magazine and gaol. The fraternisation of several of the soldiers with the Irish convicts had already caused some concern in the garrison but no action had been taken. However, preparations were so advanced that the plan was brought forward to the night of Saturday 13 December but was deferred for twenty-four hours following a meeting at which the rebels disagreed about whether the officers, their wives and children should be killed or not. In the interim, the conspiracy was betrayed to Foveaux by Henry Grady, a reluctant rebel who had been convicted for rape not sedition and Thomas Hodges. Foveaux acted decisively and with his civil and military officers agreed that capital punishment should be used, perhaps angered that his leniency had been abused or by the threat of violence to women and children.[2] McLean and John Houlahan (Wolloghan), aged 24 and from Munster, named as the chief organiser of the pike-making were arrested on the Sunday morning and hanged in the afternoon before the assembled convicts and soldiers. The four soldiers involved were ceremoniously drummed out of the NSW Corps and received 500 lashes each. Grady got a free pardon.  Although there were some questions about the legality of summary executions, King agreed with Foveaux’s actions and submitted a favourable report to London. [3]

Until severe asthma forced him to return first to Sydney in September 1803 and to London a year later, Foveaux concentrated his efforts on improving conditions on Norfolk Island, paying particular attention to public works, with results that earned high praise from both King and Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State. More questionable, however, was the dubious morality of allowing the sale of female convicts to settlers. Despite these advances, the future of Norfolk Island as a penal settlement, initially questioned by King as early as 1794, had already been decided before Foveaux left. It was too remote, too costly to maintain and the lack of a harbour made it difficult for shipping and, with the establishment of a settlement in VDL in 1803, there was now an alternative location for a penal settlement for difficult convicts. By 1803, Lord Hobart called for the removal of part of the Norfolk Island military establishment, settlers and convicts to VDL, due to its great expense and the difficulties of communication with Sydney. [4] Foveaux made his view clear to the Colonial Office that Norfolk Island should be abandoned in favour of VDL on his leave in England. [5]

John Houston, a naval lieutenant, was sent from Sydney to take over as Lieutenant-Governor and arrived at Norfolk Island on 13 February 1804 with Captain John Piper of the NSW Corps. Foveaux also returned to the island in February and continued with his plans for improvement but in July 1804 received a despatch from King ordering evacuation of the island. [6] Houston returned to Sydney and Piper became Lieutenant-Governor, a position he held until January 1810. [7] The duty of carrying out the frequently altered instructions fell to Piper and he appears to have exhibited both tact and organising ability. The evacuation was achieved more slowly than anticipated because of the reluctance of settlers to uproot themselves from the land they had struggled to tame and compensation claims for loss of stock. It was also delayed by King who insisted on the importance of the island for the whaling industry and probably his own personal attachment to it. [8] The first group of 159 left in February 1805 and comprised mainly convicts and their families and military personnel, only four settlers departing. [9] Between November 1807 and September 1808, five groups of 554 people left. Only about 200 remained, forming a small settlement until the remnants were removed in 1813. A small party led by a trusted emancipated convict William Hutchinson, which finally left on 15 February 1814, remained to slaughter stock and destroy all buildings so that there would be no incentive for anyone, especially from another European power, to visit or attempt to colonise it. [10]

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[1] Earnshaw, John, ‘Palmer, Thomas Fyshe (1747-1802)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 312-313.

[2] HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 266-267, details the meeting

[3] King to Portland, 10 March 1801, HRNSW, Vol. 4, p. 319, 325,

[4] Hobart to King, 24 June 1803, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 157-159; this was not received by King until May 1804.

[5] See, Lieutenant-Governor Foveaux’s Observations concerning the Removal of the Settlement at Norfolk Island, 25 March 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 581-585.

[6] King to Foveaux, 20 July 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 403-406, detailed how the partial evacuation was to be managed.

[7] Barnard, Marjorie, ‘Piper, John (1773-1851)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 334-335.

[8] King to Sir Joseph Banks, 14 August 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 447-448, expressed King’s belief in the importance of Norfolk Island and King to Camden, 30 April 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 600-601, concerning the whalers.

[9] See King to Camden, 30 April 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 600-601, on the first tranche of the removal.

[10] Le Roy, Paul Edwin, ‘Hutchinson, William (1772-1846)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 574-575.

Settling Norfolk Island

Convict resistance was widespread in NSW and then VDL in the decades following the unsuccessful rebellion in 1804. The major reason why there were no further large-scale rebellions on mainland Australia was that recalcitrant convicts were increasingly isolated in punishment settlements. The discovery of coal in NSW resulted in the development of Newcastle and its example was later following in VDL with the establishment of the prison settlement at Port Arthur. However, the most feared and infamous settlement was on Norfolk Island that lay about a thousand miles from both Australia and NZ and covers an area of just over thirteen square miles and was represented as all that was bad about the convict system. Bathurst’s 1824 proclamation stated that the ‘worst description’ of convicts from NSW and VDL would be sent to the Island. [1] Its isolation and the draconian nature of its administration, especially after 1825, made it one of the most brutal penal settlements of the nineteenth century and it was the location for the other major convict rebellion in 1834. [2] In 1840, Charles Dickens volunteered to write a cheap government-sanctioned narrative of Norfolk Island to ensure that the lower orders held it in sufficient dread. [3] Such a work was unnecessary since the Island was already a byword for criminality and perversity.

Sighted and named by Captain Cook in 1774, Norfolk Island was included as an auxiliary settlement in the British government’s plan for colonisation of NSW in 1786 and initially settled in March 1788. The decision to settle Norfolk Island, as well as the main settlement at Botany Bay, was based on its natural resources: tall, straight Norfolk Island pines and the NZ flax plant. [4] Cook had taken samples back to Britain and reported on their potential uses for the Royal Navy. Britain was heavily dependent on flax for sails and hemp for ropes largely imported from Russia through the Baltic Sea ports and also on timbers for mainmasts from New England. Relying on potentially erratic imports of these supplies posed a threat to Britain’s naval supremacy. Norfolk Island offered an alternative source and some historians, notably Geoffrey Blainey, have argued that this was a major reason for the founding of the convict settlement of NSW in 1788. The Universal Daily Register revealed the plan for a dual colonisation of Norfolk Island and Botany Bay:

The ships for Botany Bay are not to leave all the convicts there; some of them are to be taken to Norfolk Island, which is about eight hundred miles East of Botany Bay, and about four hundred miles short of New Zealand. [5]

The advantage of a non-Russian source of flax and hemp for naval supplies was referred to in Lloyd’s Evening Post:

It is undoubtedly the interest of Great-Britain to remain neutral in the present contest between the Russians and the Turks...Should England cease to render her services to the Empress of Russia, in a war against the Turks, there can be little of nothing to fear from her ill-will. England will speedily be enabled to draw from her colony of New South Wales, the staple of Russia, hemp and flax. [6]

Governor Arthur Phillip’s final instructions, given him in April 1787 less than three weeks before sailing, included the requirement to colonise Norfolk Island to prevent it falling into the hands of France, whose naval leaders were also showing interest in the Pacific. [7]

...as soon as Circumstances may admit of it...to prevent its being occupied by the Subjects of any other European Power. [8]

Phillip had chosen King as second lieutenant on HMS Sirius for the expedition to establish a convict settlement in NSW. King had served with Phillip before the First Fleet and was regarded as his protégé. Phillip certainly had a high opinion of King and consciously promoted his interests throughout the late 1780s and 1790s. Despite his lowly rank, soon after the settlement was established at Sydney Cove, King was selected to lead a small party of convicts and guards to set up a settlement at Norfolk Island. On 14 February 1788, he sailed for his new post with a party of twenty-three, including fifteen convicts. [9] On 6 March 1788, King and his party landed with difficulty, owing to the lack of a suitable harbour and set about building huts, clearing the land, planting crops and resisting the ravages of grubs, salt air and hurricanes. [10] More convicts were sent and these proved occasionally troublesome. Early in 1789, King prevented a mutiny when some of the convicts planned to take him and the other officers prisoner and escape on the next boat to arrive. [11] Despite the lack of a safe harbour, of lime and timbered land, there was plenty of fish, the stock flourished and the soil was good. It could maintain ‘at least one hundred families’, King told Phillip. Impressed by his work, the governor several times recommended his subordinate for naval promotion, but this would have raised difficulties because of King’s lack of seniority. To resolve the problem the Secretary of State announced in December 1789 that King would be appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island at a salary of £250. [12]

Wreck of HMS Sirius on the reef at Norfolk Island 1790

Following the wreck of Sirius at Norfolk Island in March 1790, King left and returned to England to report on the difficulties facing the settlements in NSW. During his twenty months absence, the island was under the command of Lieutenant-Governor Robert Ross [13] but Ross was not an easy commandant and convicts, settlers, soldiers and officials had become discontented under his rule. [14] King found ‘discord and strife on every person’s countenance’ and was ‘pestered with complaints, bitter revilings, back-biting’. [15] Tools and skilled labour were both in short supply. Thefts were common and there was still no criminal court on the island, despite the representations he had made in London on the need for better judicial arrangements.[16] However, King’s guidance helped to improve conditions. The regulations he issued in 1792 encouraged the settlers, who were drawn from ex-marines and ex-convicts, and he was willing to listen to their advice on fixing wages and prices and other things. Unfortunately King had no success with growing the flax that so interested the British government. [17] The pine timber was found to be not durable enough for masts and this industry was also abandoned. By 1794, the island was self-sufficient in grain and had a surplus of swine that it could send to Sydney. Maize, wheat, potatoes, cabbage, timber, flax and fruit of all kinds grew well, the population grew to more than 1,100 and about a quarter of the island was cleared. Suffering from gout, King returned to England in October 1796, and after regaining his health, he resumed his naval career.

Between 1796 and 1800, Norfolk Island was ruled by Captain John Townson and then briefly by Captain Thomas Rowley. Townson spent six years on Norfolk Island between late 1791 and 1799 and received a twenty acre lease. [18] His administration was generally capable and he seems to have had a steadying influence on both convicts and settlers. When Townson left prematurely in November 1799, Rowley, as the senior officer, took charge of the settlement. He ordered liquor stills to be demolished to reduce the drunkenness on the island, and this move brought threats of prosecution from their owners. [19] King returned to NSW in early 1800 as Governor. [20] He appointed Major Joseph Foveaux as Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island in June 1800. [21]

Foveaux found the settlement quite run down, little maintenance having been carried out in the previous four years. Its population consisted of 519 men, 165 women and 269 children and had an unusually high ratio of free settlers to convicts: not including children, there were 308 free settlers and 272 convicts. Foveaux was unimpressed with his civil administration regarding the NSW Corps officers generally unfavourably. [22] He set about building up the community, particularly through public works and attempted to improve education. By 1800, Norfolk Island was a regular stop from the increasing number of whaling ships from the United States and Britain. Whale oil was much in demand, not least as a means of street lighting and by 1802 almost a hundred ships were involved in the Southern Ocean fishery. Whalers made lengthy voyages, often lasting two or three years and they found that wood and food were cheaper on Norfolk Island than in Sydney. This gave a welcome boost to the island’s economy. Whaling captains were often of assistance to Foveaux, selling tools and other goods needed on the island and carrying despatches to and from England. However, on occasions Foveaux complained that whalers overcharged for taking goods and passengers to Sydney and demanded urgent repairs that interfered with his plans for public works and farming. [23]

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[1] Bathurst to Brisbane, 22 July 1824, HRA, Series I, Vol. 11, p. 322.

[2] See, Hoare, Merval, Norfolk Island; An outline of its history 1774-1968, fifth edition, (University of Queensland Press), 1999, Hazzard, Margaret, Punishment Short of Death: A History of the Penal Settlement at Norfolk Island, (Hyland House), 1984, Treadgold, M. L., Bounteous Bestowal: The economic history of Norfolk Island, (Australian National University), 1988, and O’Collins, Maev, An Uneasy Relationship: Norfolk Island and the Commonwealth of Australia, (ANU Press), 2002, pp. 1-19. Benton, Laura, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900, (Cambridge University Press), 2010, pp. 197-208, examines the uses made of extra-legal disciplinary systems.

[3] Dickens to Normanby, 3 July 1840, in Storey, Graham, Tillotson, Kathleen, and Easson, Angus, (eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 7, 1853-1855, (Oxford University Press), 1993, p. 818. The letter was referred to in the context of Hard Times, (Bradbury & Evans), 1854, p. 178, where Norfolk Island is briefly mentioned.

[4] See, Nobbs, R., (ed.), Norfolk Island and its First Settlement, 1788-1814, (Library of Australian History), 1988, and Donohoe, J. H., Norfolk Island, 1788-1813: the people and their families, (J. H. Donohoe), 1986.

[5] Universal Daily Register, 23 December 1786.

[6] Lloyd’s Evening Post, 5 October 1787.

[7] Dyer, Colin, The French Explorers and Sydney, (University of Queensland Press), 2009, draws on French observations of the British convict settlement in NSW.

[8] HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 84-91, HRA, Series I: Vol. 1, pp. 2-9.

[9] Crittenden, Victor, King of Norfolk Island: The Story of Philip Gidley King as Commandant and Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island, (Mulini Press), 1993. For King’s appointment and instructions see, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 136-138. Fidlon, P. G., and Ryan, R. J., (eds.), The Journal of Philip Gidley King: Lieutenant, R.N., 1787-1790, (Australian Documents Library), 1980, gives King’s view of his governance of Norfolk Island until 1790.

[10] Phillip to Sydney, 28 September 1788, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 185-187, provides analysis of the resources of Norfolk Island. See also, Phillip, Arthur, The voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay: with an account of the establishment of the colonies of Port Jackson & Norfolk Island, 3rd ed., (Printed for J. Stockdale), 1790. Ross to Phillip, 11 February 1791, gives a detailed discussion of problems encountered, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 434-450.

[11] Phillip to Sydney, 12 February 1790, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 293-294. Since Phillip had corresponded with Sydney during 1789, it is difficult to explain why he left it a year before informing him of the mutiny.

[12] For King’s commission dated 28 January 1790, see, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 287-288.

[13] For Ross’ instruction dated 2 March 1790, see, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 314-316. See also his observations on the island in December 1790, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 416-420, and the contrast with King’s observations in January 1791 when he was in London, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 428-431. See also, Macmillan, David S., ‘Ross, Robert (1740?-1794)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 397-398.

[14] Ross had introduced martial law almost as soon as he arrived at Norfolk Island because of the loss of the Sirius; see, Ross to Phillip, 22 March 1790, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 319-320, and also the enclosures pp. 321-323, in which Ross laid down the standards that would now operate on the island. Phillip informed Grenville in a letter dated 14 July 1790, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 357-358. Food shortages on Norfolk Island led Ross to introduce draconian measures to conserve supplies in proclamations on 7 August 1790, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 390-393.

[15] King to Under Secretary Evan Nepean, 23 November 1791, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), p. 562; see also King to Phillip, 29 December 1791, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 572-580.

[16] See Phillip to Dundas, 4 October 1791, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), p. 655, on the inconveniences of the lack of a criminal court on Norfolk Island. Legislation was finally passed in London establishing a criminal court on Norfolk Island on 9 May 1794, HRNSW, Vol. 2, pp. 235-236.

[17] King to Dundas, 19 November 1793, HRNSW, Vol. 2, pp. 86-98, details the voyage to NZ to obtain Maori help with flax production. This failed and the natives returned to NZ, HRNSW, Vol. 2, p. 174.

[18] Austin, M., ‘Townson, John (1759?-1835)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 536-537.

[19] Fletcher, B. H., ‘Rowley, Thomas (1748?-1806)’, ADB, Vol. 2, p. 403.

[20] King arrived in NSW with the letter (Portland to Hunter, 5 November 1799, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 733-738, HRA, Series I: Vol. 2, pp. 387-392, recalling Governor John Hunter was received on 16 April 1800, but he did not hand over the government to King until 28 September.

[21] See, King to Portland, 29 April 1800, HRNSW, vol. 4, p. 79, makes clear King’s decision and King to Foveaux, 26 June 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 96-108, details Foveaux’s appointment and instructions. See also, Fletcher, B. H., ‘Foveaux, Joseph (1767-1846)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 407-409, and Whitaker, Ann-Maree, Joseph Foveaux: power and patronage in early New South Wales, (University of New South Wales Press), 2000, pp. 55-80, for his years on Norfolk Island.

[22] State of the Settlement in Norfolk Island, 6 November 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 252-253.

[23] On the development of the South Sea whale-fishery, see, minutes of the Board of Trade, 4 December 1801, HRNSW, Vol. 4, p. 630. See also, Little, B., ‘Sealing and Whaling in Australia Before 1850’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 9, (1969), pp. 109-127.