#prison hulk

[ltwilliammowett]

Convicts being rowed out to a prison hulk by Harriot, W H, 1834

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Through their physical boundedness and separation from the mainland, islands were both practical and symbolic sites to incarcerate those who “threatened” colonial society. They acted as “colonial peripheries”, replicating in microcosm transportation from the metropole to the colony. However, punitive relocation to islands was a colonial system of punishment that was distinct from metropolitan transportation, in purpose as well as scale. In particular, it reflected the need to geographically differentiate general convict society and places of secondary punishment for convicts who reoffended in the colony. Relocation to carceral islands was also part of frontier warfare and territorial acquisition, which violently displaced Indigenous Australians from their lands. This, in turn, resulted in racially distinct forms of island incarceration, despite spatial continuities. Since the Australian colonies relied on free labour, islands were also ideal sites for labour extraction, as their isolation allowed limited mobility for extramural labour and they were also proximate to the sea. The convict industries on carceral islands were often maritime, with convicts logging wood and harvesting hemp to build boats, constructing maritime infrastructure – including jetties, seawalls, lighthouses, and docks – or engaging in activities like fishing, shell collecting, and salt panning. The entanglement of punitive and economic motives was directly tied to the natural geography of these island sites, and the need of colonies to be part of imperial networks of trade and communication.

Carceral islands fulfilled different roles within the colonial project for colonial governance and imperial expansion. These purposes blurred together and changed over time. First, convicts were sent to colonize remote islands and coastal sites, which were politically and commercially strategic. Second, islands were used alongside other geographically remote locations, as sites of particular punishment for those perceived to be the “worst” kind of convict. Third, Indigenous Australians were forcibly confined on island institutions, which were not always explicitly carceral; yet, by displacing Indigenous people to islands (under sentence or not) the government reduced resistance to European conquest, rendering the land one step closer to terra nullius (nobody’s land).”

- Katherine Roscoe, “A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period, 1788–1901.” International Review of Social History 63 (2018), p. 48

[ltwilliammowett]

The River Tamar, by Henry Thomas Dawson (1841–1918)

[ltwilliammowett]

A prison hulk in harbor, ca. 1810, by an unknown English Artist

[ltwilliammowett]

Cutaway model of the Prison Hulk (HMS) York c. 1820, by Peter Heriz- Smith 1987

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Governor Thomas Brisbane’s decision to settle the northern coast of Australia in the mid-1820s was also explicitly motivated by commercial interests, though this time to tap into the market for trepang (sea cucumber) in China, and as a gateway to further trade with the southeast Asian archipelago. The British had recently relinquished territories seized from the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago during the Napoleonic wars, so they were eager to expand their commercial reach. A secondary motive was to prevent any European power claiming territory on the unsettled edges of the Australian continent. In 1818, Captain Philip Parker King had surveyed the northern coast and reported back with evidence of abandoned Macassan (Sulawesi) camps for smoking trepang. 

On the basis of this report, trader William Barnes wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, in July 1823 with a proposal to establish a British trepang fishery on the Cobourg peninsula. The chairman of the East India Trade Committee, George Larpent, urged Bathurst to approve a British settlement there for “the greatest benefit to the commerce […] of the United Kingdom [...] [and to] place our flourishing possessions in that quarter of the Globe in greater security”. Despite Larpent’s advice to settle on the mainland, the Colonial Office issued Captain Barlow instructions to establish a settlement in the “Apsley’s Channel between Melville and Bathurst Island”. Looking at a map in London, the islands may have seemed to Lord Bathurst physically closer to trading routes, even though currents, winds, and reefs actually rendered them almost impossible to access.

In 1824, forty-five settlers – only three of them free men – were shipped aboard the HMS Tamar to the northern coast. The convicts were chosen by the Principal Superintendent of Convicts on the basis of their trades, with the majority skilled in construction, and their ethnicity, as thirteen of the eighty convicts selected were black as officials thought they were better able to withstand hard labour in a tropical climate than white convicts. Ultimately, the difficulty of navigating the Apsley Strait – which was shallow, rocky, and subject to strong winds during the monsoon season – meant few British trading ships got through to the settlement and no Macassan vessels at all. On deciding to abandon it in 1829, Governor Ralph Darling suggested the convicts be relocated to Croker Island, a few kilometres off the Cobourg Peninsula. Instead, the convicts were transferred to the existing settlement at Port Raffles. It seems that colonial governors and imperial administrators had an island bias even when local experts and East India Company officials suggested better-located mainland sites for settlement.

Underpinning these epistolary exchanges was the idea that islands were interchangeable and universally preferable for convict-built commercial hubs. This is underlined by the comparisons made by East India Company officials and colonial newspapers between the “Australian” islands – Norfolk Island and Melville Island – and Indian Ocean island penal colonies – the Straits Settlements. The Straits Settlements were East India Company penal settlements for Indian convicts at Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, and were united in 1826. On 10 March 1825, The Australian colonial newspaper hoped that “[w]hat twenty years have accomplished at Penang, at which period it was a barren sand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that half that time will bring to pass at Melville Island”. In 1827, an East India Company officer (calling himself “M”) suggested in the Asiatic Journal that Melville Island be reopened to replace “its two rivals”, Penang and Singapore, as the destination for Indian convicts. The anonymous officer concluded that Melville Island should not be abandoned, for “the same reasons that Norfolk Island was reoccupied” as a penal settlement in 1825, namely for “its utility to Australia, as a Northern emporium and naval station”. Though Norfolk Island and Melville Island were administered by New South Wales, they mapped better onto Pacific and Indian Ocean maritime trading routes. These Australian islands were part of a much wider practice of sending convicts as “empire-builders” to islands that were economically and politically strategic for British imperial interests.”

- Katherine Roscoe, “A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period, 1788–1901.” International Review of Social History 63 (2018), p.50-52.

[ltwilliammowett]

Visiting day on the prison hulk, by English School c. 1830

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"When Henry Dana and the native police went to the Wimmera in 1845, the contingent was drawn from the force instituted in 1842. Mooted in the Bigge Report, the possibility of investing Aboriginal men as native constables became an actuality in the Port Phillip District. This model of law enforcement went through three distinct phases with Aboriginal Police Corps being instituted in 1837, 1839 and 1842. The native police came to be a devastatingly effective instrument used by the colonial authorities against other Aboriginal people.

In July 1845, Dana wrote to La Trobe about an armed encounter between his men and some Jardwadjali of the Choorite balug clan. The events leading up to this encounter, told from the perspective of settler Thomas Baillie, were detailed in a sworn statement enclosed with Dana’s letter. Baillie and his business partner Hamilton occupied land near a lake about 15 miles from Mt Arapiles. On Thursday 10 July 1845, while Baillie and his shepherd were attending the sheep ‘several Natives rushed from the Forest and took away the whole flock’. The station owner and his shepherd pursued them, recovering some sheep.

Hamilton fetched Dana and his native police who tracked the missing animals. After travelling 30 miles, they ‘came up with a number of sheep with their legs broken’. They found 200 sheep ‘in a bush yard’ and some Aborigines nearby. In the fracas that followed, Dana = explained how ‘the Ringleader of the party was cut down after a long resistance, by Yupton a corporal of the native police and made a prisoner of; he is badly wounded. I have ordered him to be marched to Melbourne as soon as his wounds will permit’. The ‘ringleader’ was Yanem Goona, also known as Yanengoneh (‘spring from the earth’) or Old Man Billy Billy. Dana justified opening fire, killing at least three Choorite balug men and wounding others, by claiming he and his men were at risk, but may have exaggerated the danger.

Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, claimed the native police openly boasted they ‘were not going to take prisoners but to shoot as many of the blacks as they could’. A history of retributive killings is evident in a newspaper report on the loss of Baillie’s and Hamilton’s sheep that stated ‘the tribe who committed this serious depredation is the same which Messrs Powlett and Dana at different times thinned of its fair proportions in a skirmish with the black rascals’."

- Kristyn Harman, Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Māori Exiles. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2012. p. 108-109.