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Introduction 1 Introduction On 30 December 1846, the Launceston Examiner informed its readers of “A New Invention.” According to the paper: An ingenious writer in the London Athenaeum (we suppose a graduate in “prison discipline”) has propounded a series of moveable panopticons, which are to contain only six men, and are to be advanced from place to place, as the labourers on the roads advance. An overseers “berth” composes the centre compartment, supervising by a simple construction of six subdivisions in which the men are to sleep, as completely separated as if they were in distinct dwellings, while not a breath can be uttered that must not be heard by the overseer. It is also part of this plan, that when the whole gang is mustered at night, its superintendent or chief officer, keeping a sort of sleeping rolster [sic] roll sends the men to their respective panopticons, never sending to successive nights the same six men together. Thus supposing that the road gang consisted of fifty men, those acquainted with the common arithmetic doctrine of permutation, well know that in the course of usual sentences on the roads, the same can never, if the rolster is properly regulated, come together again.1 Throughout 1846 the Launceston Examiner had loudly and repeatedly denounced the existence of ‘unnatural crime’ among the male prisoners in the colony. Today we might marvel at the meticulous ordered detail of the ‘new invention.’ The moving panopticon embodied in microcosm the innovative techniques of contemporary penal discipline: the surveillance of sleeping spaces, the separation of bodies, the imposition of silence. At the heart of this discipline lay an obsessive concern with sexual repression. Beyond the gaze of the overseer’s berth, colonial readers would have perceived the ‘new invention’ as an antidote to a myriad of cultural tensions that had been produced by the transportation of male prisoners. Georgian and Victorian penal discourse was saturated in sexual anxiety. Within the lexicon of colonial morality, these anxieties assumed similar prominence. 1 Launceston Examiner, 30 December 1846. 2 Gender Relations in the Penal Colonies Between 1787 and 1869 approximately 165 000 convicted prisoners were transported to Australia. Women comprised only 25 000 of these involuntary exiles. Before the First Fleet set sail, convict gender relations had featured in the discussions that surrounded the foundation of the penal colony in New South Wales.2 Lord Sydney was concerned with the need to ‘preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders’.3 The importation of native women from the South Sea Islands was considered a ‘possible solution.’ With typical English arrogance, the explorer James Matra asserted that procuring island women would present little difficulty because they were ‘more partial to Europeans than to their own countrymen’.4 Two years of extra food rations for these women accompanied the first transports. There were 756 convicts sent out on the first voyage, yet only 186 were women.5 It was not intended to introduce a form of sexual slavery into the new colony. Rather, the presence of island women was deemed a moral necessity ‘not only for the preservation of decency and good order, but for attending to domestic concerns’.6 The first Governor, Arthur Phillip was strictly instructed to ‘exert every means to prevent their living in common with the convicts’ and to ‘promote matrimonial connexion’ [sic].7 Marriage was perceived to be ‘a great advantage to the settlement as well as to the interests and happiness of the individuals’.8 Happy, healthy and sexually fulfilled convicts would make a pliant and disciplined workforce, so necessary to the foundation of a new settlement. This found further expression in the strict measures that were taken ‘to prevent any of the convicts from being sent that have any venereal complaint’.9 Death at the hands of the cannibalistic natives of New Zealand would be the fate of any man who ‘unnaturally’ transgressed this Christian moral code. 2 For early discussions on the founding of the penal colonies see G. Martin, The Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins, Sydney, 1978; A. Atkinson, ‘The First Plans for Governing New South Wales 1786-87’ in Australian Historical Studies, vol 24, no 94, April, 1990, pp 22-40. 3 Quoted in O. Rutter, The First Fleet, Golden Cockerel Press, London, 1937, p 46. 4 Ibid, p 38. 5 Ibid, p 18. 6 Ibid, p 103. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid, p 55. 3 ‘The dread of this’ reasoned Phillip, ‘will operate much stronger than the fear of death’.10 This draconian idea was not carried out in practice. As Robert Hughes remarked, ‘there were no spare ships to ferry the “madge culls,” “mollies” and “fluters,” as homosexuals were known in Georgian cant, across the Tasman Sea to enrich the Maori diet’.11 However it served as an early warning: sex in the colony was to be normal, reproductive and useful. These early ideas reveal that the foundation of the penal colony of New South Wales was based upon a gendered moral order. Sexual behaviour was firmly located within the institution of marriage and family life. This was the ideal, yet for many transported men it was not a possibility. Plans to procure island women were not fulfilled. For the next sixty years, the gender dynamics of imperial transportation generated acute cultural anxieties. Transportation and colonisation went hand in hand to the eastern Australian colonies. This compounded moral tensions. In the 1830s and 1840s colonial society was in a state of flux and it is these years that form the main focus of this study. It was during these two decades that the numbers of convicts transported to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land peaked. Free immigration from Britain also increased dramatically during this time. After 1840, transportation to eastern Australia was exclusively directed to Van Diemen’s Land. The final transport ship arrived in Hobart in 1853. The gender imbalance remained prominent. During the slow transition from penal colony to respectable free society, debates over prison reform and the future of imperial transportation were anxiously played out in the colonies. The moral and cultural concerns of colonial society were both real and imagined. They informed a variety of discourses that linked the colonial periphery with the metropolitan centre in a relationship that was reciprocal but often antagonistic.12 10 Ibid, p 57. 11 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Collins Harvill, 1987, p 265. 12 This thesis is informed by Dane Kennedy’s observation that ‘Imperialism was a process of mutual interaction, of point and counter-point that inscribed itself on the dominant partner, as well as the dominated one’. See D. Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’ in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol 24, no 3, September, 1996, p 358; See also his ‘ Review Article: The Boundaries of Oxford’s Empire’ in The International History Review, vol xxiii, no 3, September, 2001, pp 604-22. 4 Gordon Carmichael has suggested that the gender imbalance made the colonies ‘daunting places for women’.13 But what was the impact of an uneven gender ratio upon male convicts? Did they truly line up at the quaysides of Sydney and Hobart on hearing rumours that a female transport ship was about to arrive? In what ways have male convicts been included in historical research on colonial gender relations and sexuality? In 1987 Marian Aveling noted that ‘the manipulation of the construction of male sexuality in the interests of class must surely be getting near the top of the research agenda’.14 Despite her suggestion, male convict sexuality has remained under-researched. It makes a brief appearance in some of the scholarly literature on colonial gender relations.15 Yet in most convict histories, the historical emphasis on the female convict as a sexual being has attenuated the fact that men too are sexual creatures. Feminist convict historiography has also reiterated the idea that sex and sexuality for men was normative and natural, whereas the behaviour of women has been seen in cultural terms as deviant or immoral.16 In this respect, the lack of any real analysis of male convict sexuality stems from the idea that there was not much to study.17 In a related context, Judith Allen has argued that masculinity is ‘ubiquitous so unnoticeable; given hence un-chartable; natural thus inscrutable; dominant and un-submissive to analysis’.18 Allen suggested that, ‘while phallocentric discourses have obsessively studied and constructed femininity, it is only within feminist frameworks that the failure to analyse masculinity can be noticed, and more, be identified as an intellectual flaw’.19 13 G. Carmichael, ‘So many Children: Colonial and Post-Colonial Demographic Patterns’ in K. Saunders & R. Evans (eds.) Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Sydney, 1992, p 107. 14 M. Aveling, ‘Gender in Early New South Wales’ in Push from the Bush, no 24, April, 1987, p 33. 15 See Mary Ann Jebb & Anna Haebich, ‘Across the Great Divide: Gender Relations on Australian Frontiers’ and Renate Howe & Shurlee Swain, ‘Fertile Grounds for Divorce: Sexuality and Reproductive Imperatives’ both in K. Saunders & R. Evans, (eds.), (1992), op. cit., pp 20-41; pp158-74. 16 See K. Daniels, Convict Women, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998. 17 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Routledge, London, 1994, esp. pp 10-11. 18 Judith Allen, ‘The ‘Masculinity’ of Criminality and Criminology: Interrogating Some Impasses’ in M. Findlay & R. Hogg (eds.) Understanding Crime and Criminal Justice, Law Book Co Ltd, Sydney, 1988, p 16. 19 Ibid. 5 Convict Scholarship The ‘habitual male criminal’ and his consort in crime, the refractory ‘immoral whore,’ informed nineteenth-century criminal discourse.
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