A Secret Country Read online

  He was taken to Cork harbour and fitted with four-pound leg irons, which were standard. He was then ‘stored’ on a hulk left over from the Napoleonic wars, where convicts slept six to a berth, chained together, and rats scampered and defecated. Far from being the colonial gentleman my aunt had conjured, McCarthy belonged to what Queen Victoria called ‘the inflammable matter of Ireland’ and Jeremy Bentham inveighed against as ‘the animae viles, a sort of excrementitious mass that could be projected, and accordingly was projected . . . as far out of sight as possible’.2

  Shit, that is. And shit to be disposed of along with the ‘swinish multitude’3 of the English lower orders whom Georgian Britannica was sending to its antipodean Siberia, just as Soviet Russia would despatch its political dissenters and Nazi Germany its ethnic and sexual deviants.

  The year was 1821. McCarthy was twenty-six years old, standing five feet nine inches with sandy hair and a red bushy beard. In the early hours of June 13, 1821 he was taken by barge to the John Barry, a 520-ton barque, being readied for departure to Botany Bay, wherever that might be.

  The voyage of the John Barry took five days short of five months. It was likely to have been no different from most such voyages: a purgatory of dysentery, pneumonia and scurvy, with the 180 convicts wallowing in each other’s vomit and filth in the ship’s hold – although the ship’s surgeon, John McNamara, appears to have been a kind man, concerned about the convicts’ health.

  One of my favourite places in Australia is Manly on the ocean front at Sydney, with its Norfolk pines bent like reeds against the wind and spray. At one end of the bay is North Head, where the surf bucks against vertical cliffs. This is one of the towering gateposts to Sydney Harbour. I have often walked along the paths winding around North Head, which is not much changed since the John Barry hove to in the swell below. Facing the greatest expanse of water on earth, the Pacific, I have tried to imagine McCarthy’s thoughts on the day he caught sight of his new prison, Australia. The convicts had been told that the Aborigines feasted on white flesh, and they must have glimpsed these ‘savages’ standing on jagged rocks protruding at the water’s edge like monstrous teeth and on the creamy sand of perfect beaches. Or perhaps their fear had long since been overtaken by the relief of reaching somewhere, anywhere.

  ‘Shout out your trade!’ McCarthy and the other Irishmen were ordered, having been brought ashore in a long boat, still in leg irons and wearing their yellow prisoners’ uniform. He had no trade and was ‘assigned’ to labour for a Mr Robertson, by all accounts a benevolent man not unlike the patrician slave owners in the American Deep South. It was Mr Robertson who lived on ‘elegant Brickfield Hill’. In her version my aunt had neatly swapped master and slave.

  On October 24 of that year, while McCarthy was at sea in the John Barry, an Irish scullery maid from a London house stood in the dock of the small court attached to Middlesex Gaol and heard her sentence: ‘Transportation for the term of your natural life to New South Wales.’

  Her name was Mary Palmer. She was sixteen, with brown hair, hazel eyes and skin described in a church register as ‘pitted from the smallpox’. I cannot find record of what she did to deserve such a punishment, but it was almost certainly a crime against property. She had originally been sentenced to death; but this was commuted, thanks, according to a family source, to her pregnancy.4 She sailed one year and a day later, manacled in the hold of the Lord Sidmouth. She was my great-great grandmother.

  Robert Hughes described vividly in The Fatal Shore the scene when a ship bearing female convicts anchored in Sydney:

  its upper deck became a slave-market, as randy colonists came swarming over the bulwarks, grinning and ogling and chumming up to the captain with a bottle of rum, while the female convicts – washed for the occasion and dressed in the remnants of their English finery – were mustered before them, trying as hard ‘to set themselves off to the best advantage’. Military officers got the first pick, then non-commissioned officers, then privates, and lastly such ex-convict settlers as seemed ‘respectable’.5

  The first white women of Australia thus were regarded as little better than prostitutes. On the voyage out seamen were given ‘free access’ to the convict women or allowed to cohabit with those of their choice; gang rape was not uncommon. On arrival women were ‘assigned’ as ‘house servants’, which usually carried an obligation to service sexually the predominantly male population. This fact was generally suppressed by Australia’s imperial historians.

  Mary Palmer arrived emaciated and ill, although the nature of her illness is not recorded. So it is unlikely she was of use to anyone. As was the practice with the sick, she was lifted with planks on to the dockside. And she and those like her, described by Hughes as ‘the rejects from the “market”, the poor, the ugly, the mad, the old, the wizened’ were sent to the Female Factory, twenty miles west of Sydney at Parramatta.6

  I remember the Female Factory as the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum, which it became in the 1870s. It was the object of schoolboy banter. ‘You ought to be in Parramatta,’ was an insult. I did not know then my family’s story in Australia had begun behind the same sandstone walls. My mother remembers passing the clock tower on her wedding day and hearing the wails emanating from what was called the ‘imbeciles’ yard’ and hoping it was not a bad omen. She did not know that ‘tiny Mary’ had been incarcerated there; no one had mentioned it.

  When it opened, the Female Factory was known as the Centre of Labour Supply and Punishment, a name that conjured the Georgian Siberia. The Cumberland Pilgrim described it as ‘appallingly hideous . . . the recreation ground reminds one of the Valley of the Shadow of Death’.7 Arriving at night, Mary Palmer had nothing to sleep on, only boards and crushed stone and some straw and filthy wool full of ticks and spiders. She was put to work spinning and carding cloth the texture of hessian, which was worn by the male convicts and called ‘Parramatta cloth’. There was no division by age or crime: the strong and the weak, known as the ‘intractables’ and those ‘knuckling under’, were thrown together.

  All the women underwent solitary confinement. Their heads were shaved and they were placed in total darkness without food and with mosquitoes and spiders. ‘Penology’ was then flourishing in England, as prisons increasingly were used as depositories for the ‘criminal classes’. Penal experts of the day saw the antipodean colony as a testing ground for their exciting new theories. Thus, the ‘modern’ treadwheel was introduced into the Female Factory in 1823, the year Mary was there. The treadwheel, a device of torture, was a revolving cylinder in which the prisoner had to keep stepping upwards in order to keep the cylinder moving and not to fall out. Few of the women escaped it.

  However, this did not always have the intended effect of quelling the ‘intractables’ and breaking the women’s spirit. The New South Wales Attorney-General, Roger Terry, described, with a mixture of horror and admiration, how the women of the Factory had driven back ‘with a volley of stones and staves’ soldiers who had been sent to put down a rebellion during which the women (not the soldiers!) had used ‘excessive violence’.8 Missionaries sent from England to repair the souls of the women were given similar shrift; one of them reported, with a deep sense of failure, that at Parramatta ‘the bad soon became the worse’.9

  Nevertheless, the Factory provided a high point in the life of the colony when its marriage market was held every third Monday. This was known coyly as ‘courting day’. The 1838 House of Commons Select Committee on Transportation described what happened:

  The convict goes up and looks at the women and if he sees a lady that takes his fancy, he makes a motion to her and she steps to one side. Some will not do this, but stand still, and have no wish to be married, but that is very rare. They then have, of course, some conversation and the ceremony goes on with two or three more.10

  Some of the women found ‘finery’ for the occasion; others wore the coarse sacking of their uniform. Some primped urgently, as if any inspecting male might provide the on
ly way out of their predicament; others turned their backs if the aspiring husband was elderly, a ‘stringybark’ down from the bush. During all this the matron would bellow the ‘good points’ of each woman, which were said to be a revelation to all.

  In this way Francis McCarthy chose Mary Palmer. On November 9, 1823, in company with four other convict couples, they were married at St Mary’s Church (later Cathedral). Within eight years both were given their ‘ticket of leave’. Unions made at the Factory were not known to last, but theirs was a notable exception. When her tenth child was due in 1839, Mary was pardoned, but as she would have had to pay a fee, she did not bother to collect a splendid document, of which I have a copy. It bore the royal seal of George III, in whose name:

  I, Colonel Snodgrass, Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s said Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies, and Vice-Admiral of the same, taking into consideration the good conduct of Mary Palmer, who arrived in this Colony in the ship Lord Sidmouth . . . under sentence of Transportation for Life, . . . do hereby Conditionally Remit the remainder of the Term or Time which is yet to come and unexpired of the Original Sentence or Order of Transportation passed on the aforesaid Mary Palmer, at Middlesex Gaol.

  Mary Palmer’s conditional pardon, 1838

  This was His Majesty’s Pardon of an Exile, which Mary was granted almost fifteen years to the day after she was brought ashore. It was conditional, however, on her not ‘re-appearing in Great Britain and Ireland, for and during the Term of her Original Sentence’.

  She never ‘re-appeared’ in England or Ireland. Nor did Francis, who, having served his sentence, received his Certificate of Freedom. He lived a considerable life, becoming a miller, then a horseman rising to overseer in a ‘Horse and Buggy Bazaar’ in Sydney. Both he and Mary died in old age, remembered by their children and grandchildren with love and respect. Only later generations disclaimed them and sought to erase their memory and devalue the heroic dimension of their lives. When I learned who and what they really were, and spread the word with pride, my estrangement from the keepers of ‘our secret’ was complete. The irony of this is that droves of convict skeletons have been recently liberated from Australian closets, having found themselves the objects of an inverted snobbery which none of us would have dreamt possible in our previous lives.

  Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer’s petition to the Governor of New South Wales to be married as Roman Catholics, October 21, 1823.

  More than 160,000 men, women and children were shipped to Australia in chains. Although slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire by the Emancipation Act of 1834, it lasted in Australia for another forty years, in spite of a public campaign during which the House of Commons Select Committee compared the suffering of a convict with ‘the lot of a slave’. It also lasted long enough for the sons of the English landed class, who became known as ‘squatters’, to claim large tracts of Australia and make fortunes on the backs of their convict labourers.

  Imperial historians did not use the term ‘white slavery’, no doubt out of respect for the sensibilities that preferred ‘Government man’ to ‘convict’. The contrivance of respectability in order to obliterate ‘the Stain’ became the mission of historians and a large section of the population. This respectability required, apart from money, certain sub-Thatcherite poses. Among them was the affecting of an accent in which nasal inflexion was eliminated, if not completely, then in certain company. (One of my aunts, a sixth-generation Australian, would say, ‘Oh she speaks so Australian.’) There was also the embrace of all things British and, for some, the adoption of what were understood, often incorrectly, to be ‘English ways’; and obligatory xenophobia towards all non-British elements, such as ‘tykes’, ‘yids’ and ‘Abos’ (not necessarily in that order); and, above all, the establishment of a precise suburban existence, with manicured English flower-beds, garden gnomes and/or piccaninnies, stained glass in the front door, rooms that admitted little of the southern light and containing a row of Encyclopaedia Britannica, unopened and guarded by pieces of china commemorating the festivities and funerals of the English royal family.

  It is not possible to understand present-day Australian society without appreciating the indelibility of the ‘Stain’ and its heritage. It is such a potent part of our psyche that its appanage is passed to newcomers who are not from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds. It touches the way we are with each other, our language and humour; where else but in Australia is the vocabulary of irony, even perversity, such everyday currency? When the Royal Theatre opened in Sydney in 1796, the following lines were spoken from the stage by the Irish convict George Barrington. They were seed to our language.

  Through distant climes, O’er widespread seas we come,

  Though not with much eclat, or beat of drum.

  True patriots all, for it be understood,

  We left our country for our country’s good.11

  In their flirtation with Australia as the ‘last frontier’, many Americans believe we are similar peoples, hewn from the same, simple pioneer background. Australians have encouraged and exploited this view. I remember as a teenager seriously discussing with my friends the hope that we Australians might one day be regarded as ‘honorary Americans’, so that our isolated society might shed its dullness and insignificance. There was even something called ‘The Fifty-first State Movement’. Hollywood was omnipresent; the United States filled the vacuum of our own experience, past and present, for which there was no popular mirror. Our own story, its rapaciousness and struggle, remained secret. American mythology was very different from ours, but we did not care to admit the difference: that unlike the first white Americans, who imagined themselves on a mission from God, the first white Australians knew they were Godforsaken.

  Even the image of ourselves which Crocodile Dundee personifies, that of the outrageous, yet sceptical ‘larrikin’ who rejects all convention and authority, is mostly wrong. True, generations of us were encouraged to distrust, even despise the police: a bequest of our convict past, it was said. But we made only anti-authoritarian noises behind authority’s back and, in the end, we did as we were told, with some of us going so far as to adopt the peculiar deference that ‘lags’ have for their ‘screws’. Consider that within a few years of the abolition of white slavery in Australia, those who had survived King George’s concentration camps were rushing to help the Crown put down popular resistance in China, New Zealand and South Africa, and that during the imperial slaughter-fest of 1914–18 their sons volunteered a vassal’s army and stoically sustained more casualties, proportionately, than the British or anyone else.

  Our history travelled from convicts to trench fodder with hardly a demur; and when, in 1975, an imperial Viceroy sacked an elected Australian Government there was, wrote an American reporter, ‘a strange silence over this country’. This was not altogether true, but much of the popular reaction was that of impotence and of those concerned with ‘restoring order’. The truth is that no nation was born under as cruel a star as Australia; and if there is ever to be an Australian ‘identity’, rooted in an independent Australia free of the multifarious ties that bind, it will not be due to events set in train by the establishment of a penal colony in 1788, but in spite of them.

  Today the ‘sails’ of the Sydney Opera House rise above the botanical gardens and the ferry wharves of Circular Quay. The postcard scene is the quintessence of the new Australia: confident, dynamic, futuristic. Yet it was here that Francis and Mary and the other convicts of their period were brought ashore. To my knowledge, the Japanese and Americans stepping from their tour buses to be addressed by their guide, are not told this.

  I remember this place when it was Bennelong Point, named after the Aborigine Bennelong, who was captured in 1789 and sent to England to meet George III, while his people died from smallpox introduced by the King’s men. It was here that the launch run by the Stannard Brothers would pick me up shortly after dawn and chug through the mist and the first
shafts of light to the ships waiting just inside Sydney Heads. The ships were the Oronsay, Orion and Orsova, the Southern Cross and Northern Star, the Fairsky and Fairsea. It seemed they lined up according to parentage: the dowagers of the Orient Line ahead of those of Greek registration and uncertain birthplace. On some days there would be three or four of them: 4,000 people in one day, up to 30,000 a month, every month.

  It was 1959. I was a young journalist working as a shipping reporter on the Sydney Daily Telegraph, a position I now realise was one of great privilege because it made me a witness to an epic human migration from one end of the earth to the other. Only the unique beginning of white Australia is comparable with the story of those who came in their millions following the Second World War. Within my lifetime they have converted Australia from a whites-only fortress, a second-hand England, to a refuge for more than 100 nationalities, the second most culturally diverse society in the world after Israel. And it has happened peacefully. This is a remarkable achievement by any measure of human decency and progress.

  If I had to choose an Australian anniversary to celebrate, I would choose July 21. On that day in 1947 a man, who spoke out of the corner of his mouth and always wore a black tie, signed for Australia an agreement to take a nation of people from the refugee camps in Europe. It is difficult to know what to make of Arthur Calwell, Minister of Immigration in the post-war Labor Government. Perhaps in time he will be regarded as a visionary, a true reflection of the fears, paradoxes and strengths of his people. The man who once said that ‘no red-blooded Australian’ would want to see ‘the creation of a chocolate-coloured Australia’ conceived and implemented an immigration programme that, despite his own prejudices, has led Australia inexorably towards its future as a Eurasian society.12 What is astonishing about the upheaval Calwell planned is that it has succeeded virtually by default. In 1947 most Australians did not want diversity, or ‘multi-culturalism’; but few actively opposed it. Equally, most Australians were touched by racial and ethnic prejudice, but few generated communal conflict.