Prisons Without Walls: Prison Camps and Penal Change In
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CHAPTER ONE Prison Camps in Australia and the Historiography of Penal Change On 31 October 1913, in the scrubby coastal sand dunes near Tuncurry, on the north coast of New South Wales, five men made camp for the night. At the place they stopped stood a hut in which one of them would sleep; the others pitched tents. They had come from Goulburn, via Taree, and the journey had taken two days. Their bodies would have welcomed the rest. They had lugged a great deal of equipment with them over the dunes, four kilometres from the road—tools, building materials, kitchen utensils, clothes, bedding, as well as a large quantity of food, with just one horse and cart. Sleep, however, may have taken some time to come to them, tired as they were, for they knew that the next day was the beginning of something new, and that much hinged on how they conducted themselves here.1 Different events had led each man to this point. Those in the tents were convicted criminals; the man in the hut their guard. Percy Whirls was a thief; Arthur Pratt a forger; Frederick Harris a burglar; and Thomas Griffin was an embezzler. They were all over twenty-five years old and none had any previous convictions. Their keeper was Charles McArthur. A few days earlier, the 1200 hectares of land around the campsite had been proclaimed the Prisoners Afforestation Camp, Tuncurry. They were there to build a forest.2 The tents were in time replaced by huts, built by the men themselves. Once they had finished their unwalled prison, they were to set to work on the dunes establishing the state’s first pine plantation. For over two decades small groups of prisoners—never more than forty at a time—cleared and burnt the scrub, planted exotic pine seedlings, built firebreaks and kept the regrowth down. The prisoners’ huts were not locked at night, and 1 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales for the Year 1913, Government Printer, Sydney, 1914, pp. 12-13. 2 Tuncurry Afforestation Camp, Entrance Book, 1913-34, vol. 1 SRNSW 5/1092. 1 by day they worked in small groups or alone, often unsupervised and at considerable distances from the camp.3 These were the undramatic beginnings of an important, but little-known development in Australian penal history. The Tuncurry prison camp was the first penal institution that we would now describe as a minimum security or open institution. Based on the belief that honour, trust, outdoor labour, and limited freedom and would turn criminals into law- abiding citizens, it was an expression of a new approach to the treatment of crime. Along with a prison farm established at Emu Plains, just west of Sydney, it would become the model from which this new mode of imprisonment spread across Australia.4 The first wave of construction in the Australian prison camp movement was brief, lasting only from 1913 to 1916, and confined to NSW and Victoria. A second wave of camp- building followed, as Australian economies crashed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. When prison populations rose again during this time, institutions that were cheap to run and quick to build became increasingly attractive to administrators and politicians around the country. By 1937, every state possessed at least one such institution. Altogether, some twenty-seven prison camps were established between 1913 and 1972, between them confining tens of thousands of prisoners, providing work for hundreds of officers, and affecting the lives of countless local residents. The events at Tuncurry on 31 October 1913 were also the start of a story that sheds light on the complex, often obscured dynamics of historical penal reform. A study of the history of the camps furnishes new understandings of how and why the Australian penal systems have changed over time. This thesis is the first attempt to tell, and to interpret this story. The spread of the prison camp movement around the country, and its subsequent development are dealt with in this chapter, as is the relevant historiography. The chapter concludes with an outline of the remainder of the thesis. 3 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales for the Year 1913, pp. 12-13; Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales for the Year 1914, Government Printer, Sydney, 1915, pp. 10, 51-53. 4 In NSW the forestry camps such as that at Tuncurry were originally known as Prisoners’ Afforestation Camps while the farms like those like Emu Plains were referred to as Prison Farms. They were however, essentially, part of the same movement in penal reform, and for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to both types of prison as ‘prison camps’. 2 TUNCURRY AND EMU PLAINS: ‘A DARING INNOVATION’ In 1913, no one knew whether or not this new sort of prison would prove a success, but the initial indications were promising. Despite the degree of liberty granted the prisoners at Tuncurry, escapes were few. The prisoners worked enthusiastically, the trees grew well at first, recidivism rates were low, and the cost of running the camp compared favourably to that incurred by a conventional prison. Local residents were so impressed with the work performed by their unusual neighbours that many of them offered jobs to discharged prisoners.5 Positive effects were observed not just in the prisoners at the camp, but throughout the prison population. With ‘joyful satisfaction’, the Anglican Chaplain to Goulburn Prison noted that the Tuncurry camp ‘is exerting a good influence among the men still in gaol, for it is something to look forward to, to hope for, and work for’.6 Outsiders also judged the camp a great success. H. M. Vaughan, the South Australian Attorney General, visiting NSW to study the ‘the daring innovation’ at Tuncurry, saw a system which allowed individuals ‘who have made a mistake or a slip in life to drop into surroundings and a mode of life which will tend to make them men and not flunkeys’.7 At least some of prisoners were convinced of the merits of the scheme, too. The Reverend Schmitzer reported that his charges at Tuncurry were ‘unanimous’ that their experience at the camp would ‘enable them face the world after the sojourn at the Camp—stronger physically, mentally, and morally’.8 A few prisoners put their gratitude directly onto paper. One wrote shortly after his discharge: ‘If it were not that I am married, I would be quite content to stay’. Another declared he wished to tender my heartfelt gratitude and thanks for sending me to Tuncurry and my appreciation of the humane treatment I received during my eight months’ detention there … the man who becomes a criminal after leaving there under existing conditions is, in my opinion, a bad man indeed.9 5 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales for the Year 1915, Government Printer, Sydney, 1916, p. 47. 6 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales, for the Year 1914, Government Printer, Sydney, 1915, p. 34. 7 Tuncurry Afforestation Camp’, Northern Champion, 30 May 1917. 8 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales, for the Year 1916, Government Printer, Sydney, 1917, p. 46. 9 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales, for the Year 1916, p. 8. 3 FIGURE 1. Prisoners at Tuncurry Afforestation Camp, c.192910 The camp was, according to the Newcastle Herald, a sign that ‘we have a system in this State which represents many of the most modern ideas connected with the reformation of the criminal’.11 A little over a year after the camp at Tuncurry opened, just as Australian soldiers were embarking ships to Europe, the NSW Justice Minister David Hall opened a similar institution on the western banks of the Nepean River at the foot of the Blue Mountains. The Emu Plains Prison Farm, as it was called, was established in December 1914 on forty-three hectares of fertile alluvial floodplain farmland. Under conditions similar to those at Tuncurry, the young offenders at Emu Plains worked on their honour under the light supervision of unarmed guards, and slept at night in small wooden huts.12 Tacked to the inside of the door to each prisoner’s hut was a notice written by the CGP: The changed conditions under which you now find yourself, will, I trust, appeal to you and to your sense of honour, and that you will realise that a special opportunity is now afforded you to improve yourself in every way, and to cut away from gaol life for good and all, and that you will show by your conduct during the remainder of your sentence that you will appreciate in the fullest 10 Source: Anon., ‘The Prison Camps of New South Wales’, c.1929 ML 365.3/1A1. 11 ‘Gaol Treatment. Humane Modern Methods’, Newcastle Herald, 18 October 1922. 12 Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons, New South Wales for the Year 1914, Government Printer, Sydney, 1915, p. 10. 4 degree the efforts made to enable you to regain your self-respect, and to fit you for a fresh start in life, along better lines than those that caused your temporary lapse. You can see, and no doubt realise, by your new surroundings what is before you in the great change effected for your welfare; and with yourself rests the effect of it upon your future.13 The judiciary was impressed with the new prison. In June 1916, as he passed sentence on a young prisoner at Quarter Sessions in Sydney, Judge Bevan spoke of his long-standing reluctance to send young men to prison.