Transported
Richard Cobb
Protest & Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia 1788-1868 George Rude (Oxford £8.95) George Rude's latest book is an archival tour de force and a most impressive example of the specialised skills of a very experienced research historian. Drawing on judicial records and prison books from English, Scottish and Irish national and county records, from the provincial archives of Upper and Lower Canada, and from the penal records of the transportation settlements in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), New South Wales and Western Australia, as well as from Australian and Tasmanian nineteenth-century newspapers, Professor Rude has succeeded, thanks to an exemplary patience born of curiosity, flair and compassion, in carrying on a story, not unmitigatingly tragic, beyond the point at which most other historians had, for one reason or another, been forced to leave off: that is, immediately after sentence, or at farthest, like the abandoned wives and children of those condemned to transportation, at the port of embarkation. Many of his modest heroes, his 'village Hampdens', his victims, his cranks, his villains and his single-minded fanatics are thus granted an extension of life sometimes of up to fifty years (for most of those transported were young men and women in their twenties or thirties) bringing us into the 1880s and 1890s.
Nor is he content with following them up from the comfort of antipodean record offices: like David Williams in search of Rebecca, indeed like any social historian worth his mettle, his curiosity has taken him to isolated Ontario and Quebec, so that we can imagine him bending over mosscovered headstones in an endeavour to read the Roman (or, in the case of the Fenians, the Celtic) lettering in English or in French. We learn that a monument was put up in 1870 in Tasmania to commemorate the French Canadians transported there after the revolts of 1827 and 1828; one suspects that he was himself present at the inauguration!
In this very real, almost physical, sense, this eminently human study itself represents an act of contrition and a belated monument tic!) men and women, most of whom had Only in common that they had been forced to live out two-thirds of their lives many thousands of miles away from their places of origin. It should be added that, lin many instances, transportation, far from having tragic consequences, at least in the long ran, often offered the transportees opportunities that would certainly have beell denied them had they remained in the iron immobilism of rural poverty and want in England or Ireland. Transportation could accelerate social mobility, making of a Wiltshire ploughman an affluent sheep-farmer, of an Essex labourer a brewer or a publican.
There are some success stories that are both remarkable and ironical, transforming an arsonist, a poacher or a Luddite into a respected magistrate or chief constable (obituaries of such appearing in Hobart newspapers of the 1870s or 1880s giving no hint of how such worthy and honoured citizens originally arrived in the island which leads us to wonder whether Professor Rude's scrupulous research will be wholly welcome in some circles!), and one can even appreciate, such was the desperation of their condition, why some Irish female arsonists should have deliberately used torch and flame as a means of earning their passage — albeit a very rough and dangerous one — to Australia, in order to follow their husbands, 98-ers, White-boys, 'ribbonmen', defenderists. Whether the latter welcomed them is a matter of doubt, for several transportees made the most of distance and the slowness of communications to become bigamists: arguably another form of social mobility, if not of success. Predictably, the men were much more successful than the women, some of whom were driven into early prostitution or became domestic servants. Thus, it is the last third of his book, entitled 'Australian Exile' that is both the most original and, in human terms, the most fascinating. For it is at this ultimate stage that so many more names, so many lists from a prison ship's human cargo, come to life and develop quixotically as individuals, in an exotic and totally unfamiliar environment.
Often these 'case histories' have the same sort of picaresque charm as accounts of voyages of discovery, illustrating as they do the endearing capacity of often ignorant, semi-educated, or illiterate men, most of whom had never strayed more than a few miles from their villages, to adjust to circumstances offering all the rigours (irons, flogging, additional terms of imprisonment, etc) of a convict settlement, and exposing many to the dreadful yearning, loneliness and even physical upset of home-sickness (the French Canadians seem to have been particularly prone to le mal du pays; but even some of the English country lads 'went into a decline' soon after landing). There is something especially pathetic about the names of those early streets in Sydney, about the addresses that recur the most frequently: Kent Street, Sussex Street, York Street, Liverpool Street, Newcastle Street, Camden Street, Clarence Street, Cumberland Street, (though Fitt Street cannot have had much of an appeal to the transportees of the 1790s and 1800s) — as. though those who had named them thus had been concerned at least to give the new arrivals the illusion of still clinging on to a lost, increasingly dim South-East or North-West (there does not seem to have been arork Street). It is rather like having a drink in Little Russell Street in Calcutta. Some, it is true, did come back; but they are only a tiny minority. It is those who stayed who give this warm book its human poignancy.
Not that Professor Rude has altogether abandoned his familiar concern for numeration. There is plenty of counting — and not a little drilling — in the early part of the book. Between 1787 and 1868, 162,000 men and women were transported to Australia and Tasmania. Of these, he reckons that some 3,600 (120 of them women) could be considered to have been political or social protesters, or both, that is, about one in forty-five. There is some danger in such deliberate categorisation. When, for instance, will poaching fall on the purely criminal side of his line, and when should it be construed as an act of political or social protest? At one stage, he refers to collective poaching. Judging from the French example, poaching was generally a highly individualistic activity of people operating in very small groups or alone, and at night. Again, arson could be a form of protest; but it was more likely to be one of private vengeance. To burn down the house of the landlord or the squire (or the vicar) could no doubt pass as 'protest'; to burn down the cottage of your neighbour could be dismissed as private vengeance, but could there not be a mixture of both in either case? There are other borderline categories, such as cattle-maiming.
George Rude has always liked his history to be tidy, to speak out clearly, and to be `developing'; and this book, at least in its early part is no exception. 'Beginning to phase out', 'gradually taking over', 'more structured protest', 'refocusing of protest', and all this sort of 'each to his own' indicate efforts to bring coherence and pattern into what often must have been unconscious, spontaneous, unpremeditated, sudden and angry. There are 'arson years' and 'maiming years', and these, perhaps predictably, do not correspond as between England and Ireland (perhaps the former might also be linked to periods of drought); and such runs — and Professor Rude is at pains to indicate that they did come in runs— seem to indicate something. but one does not always know quite what. He is as ready as ever with his pointers. Qui veut tropprouver . . . It should be added, however, that, at all stages, he insists on the particularities of each successive wave of protest and on the compartmentalisation of groups which vary from naval mutineers to Luddites, from Scottish radicals to 'swing', from `defenderists' to Fenians, from Suffolk ploughmen to Chartists, from conspirators to Bristol rioters. Although often transported on the same ships and ending up in the same penal colonies, the groups keep to themselves; the Irish herd together and are avoided by the English; on becoming freedmen, Essex men set up with other Essex men. The Irish Protestants are more successful than the Irish Catholics; Welsh Dissenters stick together, the Scottish republicans have no truck with a lot of ignorant rustics. The Irish remain violent, the English are disciplined, the French Canadians have only one idea: to get back to Quebec, and, happily, most do. A few radicals remain radical, far more lapse into political apathy. Common misfortune does not breed solidarity, though people from the same county try to stick together. So do brothers, of whom there are quite a few.
Nonetheless, this is a book more about people than about numbers. It is rich both in detail and in insight and sympathy. We learn that Meagher, an 1848 man, had been to Stonyhurst; that many of the Fenians were ex-soldiers; that William Cuffay, one of the few Chartists who carried his militancy te Tasmania, was a mulatto, born in Chatham, the son of a West Indian slave (did this have something to do with his militancy?) that Patrick Kearney, a violent, drunken man from Co. Armagh, who totted up thirty-two convictions in Tasmania, had a crucifix and the letters INRI tatooed on his right arm. There are delightful quotations from Thomas Holden, a young weaver from Bolton ('the natifs of this country they are Blacks and they go naked just as they came into the world and they live on nuts of trees') and from Jacob Wiltshire (he signs `wiltsher'), a Hampshire farm labourer:Predictably, the criminals did not warm to the Cato Street conspirators. One country ploughman becomes the landlord of the Cape of Good Hope, in upland Tasmania (a reminder perhaps of the voyage out?). Several of the Irish are subsequently hanged for armed robbery, one for murder. Another of the Irish, transportees was awarded an honorary doctorate at Notre Dame University and has a bust at the Catholic University of Washington; and another again took part in the Polish insurrection of 1863. The Welsh drinking men who had taken part in Rebecca went on drinking in Tasmania.
George Rude perhaps does not believe in the element of accident in history. But we should be thankful for the accident of his own unusual career which took him from schoolmastering in London to university teaching in Australia and then in Canada, thus enabling him to boucler le boucle and to do the research literally in the three corners of the world that has enabled him to write this original and delightful book.
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