Convicts And The Colonies by Shaw A G L

Author:Shaw, A G L [Shaw, A G L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780522862973
Google: kjeCwwEACAAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2013-02-01T03:07:01+00:00

In Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur had organized a mounted police force in 1826, during ‘the heat of bushranging’. He deliberately filled it from ‘the best conducted prisoners’, who were ‘stimulated to exertion by the hope of a mitigation of their sentence’. He thought this provided a motive for their reformation and created ‘distrust and disunion among the Prisoner population’, though their presence, like that of emancipists among the ordinary constables, lowered its standing. But the governor exercised closer control than in New South Wales, and in 1828 reorganized the whole force. He now divided the colony into nine police districts–previously five–and put a stipendiary magistrate, with a force of convict mounted police, in charge of each.2

Even the governor’s critics admitted that this police system was an ‘excellent piece of policy’, and Arthur regarded the magisterial surveillance associated with it as ‘the pivot on which the whole system is turned’. Assisted by unpaid justices, the ‘stipendiaries’ supervised everything–the conduct of ticket-of-leave holders, assigned servants and their masters, the issue of passes and recommendations for indulgences, the holdings of musters and the prosecution of offenders of every sort, and when the magistrates’ summary jurisdiction was questioned, the Quarter Sessions Act of 1830 put it beyond dispute. Reflecting his military training, Arthur had told Bathurst that ‘every convict should be regularly and strictly accounted for, as Soldiers are in their respective Regiments’. He wanted to keep a full record of their conduct, their services, their good conduct and their offences ‘from their day of their landing until. . . their emancipation or death’, so he ordered the compilation of the series of ‘Black Books’ (as valuable to the historian of today as to himself!) and appointed a special officer to keep them. Thus as well as the police magistrates, and a Principal Superintendent who had general oversight over all the convicts plus particular supervision over those in government service and those near Hobart, the Governor was aided by his muster–master, who was also assistant police magistrate in Hobart. He relieved the Principal Superintendent by examining the convicts when they arrived, recording their history from the papers sent from England, from the Surgeon’s report and from his own inquiries; since he also kept the registers Arthur found so useful, his existence on the Van Diemen’s Land establishment, as well as the greater number of paid magistrates there than in the more extensive and more populous New South Wales, helps to explain the closer check kept on the convicts in the southern colony.1 By this time, the mainland governors had more non-penal colonial matters to think about, and, in any case, Supreme Court decisions between 1827 and 1830 had seriously hampered Darling’s convict administration; but at least, in 1832, Bourke was able to follow Arthur’s example and have passed a single comprehensive act to define and consolidate the magistrates’ powers.2

1 H. King, 174–5, 271 ff.; Bigge, NSW, 106, Judicial Establishments, 60; Police and Gaols Report, NSW Legs. Council, V & P, 1835, 335 ff; Brisbane to Bathurst, 18 June 1824, 14 May and 8 Nov.

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