Clarke of the Kindur by Dean Boyce

Author:Dean Boyce [Boyce, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522839524
Google: qgE6AQAAIAAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 1970-01-15T03:37:27+00:00

7 The Governor’s Pleasure

A week before Mitchell began the return journey to Sydney, Clarke and Kenny were brought before the Supreme Court to stand trial.1 Attorney-General John Kinchela charged them on five counts, to each of which they pleaded not guilty but offered no defence.2 Three charges were not proceeded with because they had been made out improperly, but the judge, Mr Justice Stephen, found both defendants guilty of stealing goods under the value of five pounds from William Cox’s station hut at Numbi, Liverpool Plains. Clarke was further found guilty of stealing Doyle’s gelding (it had been found grazing near by when Clarke was captured) and was condemned to death. Kenny was remanded, and was sentenced on 20 February 1832 to three years’ labour in irons.

In the condemned cells of Sydney gaol, Clarke now awaited the Governor’s pleasure, in fear for his life. His one hope for a second respite from the gallows was that his co-operation in giving details of the unexplored interior might be seen as a service to the colony. On 23 February the Executive Council met to receive the judges’ reports but no decision was reached on the thirty-five men then under sentence of death. Mitchell was now returning up the Peel River and had not yet forwarded his report on the expedition, and there was no reason in Sydney to suppose that it had been a failure. The Council, meeting two days later, decided in Clarke’s case ‘that sentence of death passed upon him be commuted to transportation to Norfolk Island for three years.’3 He was to labour in irons in Britain’s worst penal settlement, although the sentence was a light one for a colonial government not given to administering a mild justice. The colony’s newly-arrived Governor, Major-General Sir Richard Bourke, expecting any day to receive news that Mitchell had located Clarke’s Kindur, was probably then more inclined to be indulgent than a few days later when the Surveyor-General returned.

Clarke was now transferred from the gaol to the Phoenix, the colony’s first prison hulk,4 a transport of about seven hundred tons, which had been wrecked several years earlier on the Sow and Pigs reef in Sydney Harbour. It had been patched up, converted into a floating prison and moored in Hulk or Phoenix Bay (now known as Lavender Bay after George Lavender, boatswain of the vessel). Convicts under order of transportation were held there until disposed of in one of the colonial brigs.

Admitted to the hulk on the same day was a prisoner better known to the local press, John Knatchbull, alias Fitch. Probably the son of Sir Edward Knatchbull, ‘a rollicking squire who married three times and had at least twenty children’, he had seen much better days—as a gentleman of means and as an officer of the Royal Navy. He had commanded a naval man-of-war in several theatres, though with less distinction than he fondly imagined. In 1824 Knatchbull had been convicted under the name of Fitch for stealing a pocket-book and two sovereigns; that is, picking pockets.

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