The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

Author:Robert Hughes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780394506685
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1987-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Irish were the largest and most cohesive white minority in penal Australia, and their folkways were bound to make a deep mark on the ethos of all convicts and their descendants. The cohesion of the group is what resists pressure from outside it, and the clannish solidarity of Irishmen seems to have been experienced by many convicts who were not Irish as a way of resisting the overwhelming power of the organs of State discipline. Crime is by definition anti-social; criminals are lumpen individualists. But as Russel Ward pointed out, “When the criminal becomes a long-term convict, his scope for exercising individual cunning is very severely limited, while the forces impelling him towards social, collectivist behavior (within his own group) are correspondingly strengthened.”51 From this rude collectivism, set against the harsh environment of the country and the framework of inquisitorial law, emerged the basic traits of Australian mateship.

There is no doubt about the ties of mutual recognition, sometimes amounting to a non-ideological sort of class loyalty, that could bind convicts together. Strong friendships were forged by repression, and they were so plentiful that one example must do for all. When the convict Mellish had served out his time in Macquarie’s New South Wales, he “left the bay” as servant to a married Emancipist couple, who had made their pile in New South Wales and were returning to England. He soon found there were six convict fugitives stowed away on board, two of them friends of his. “The reason I was unhappy was, I could not do by those men as I could wish; I was oblig’d to go out a thieving every night for provishions for those men; to be shoor I brought some tools with me such as would unlock any of the harness casks where the meat was kepd.” He stole for them for a month, at great risk, before he was caught and subjected to six weeks of appalling privations, chained in the darkness of the hold. When the ship reached Cape Town, “my flesh was black and blue, and all around the wastebands of my trousers was scratch’d to pieces. . . . I have never so to say been right well since.” Yet there is not a breath of resentment in his memoir against the fellow convicts he had kept alive. “They were men that I had a very great respect for, and I do mean to say, that no man will leave behind him a friend in bondage, if they choose to chance the consequences of it.”52

Visitors to Australia noted what Alexander Harris called the “mutual regard and trust engendered by two men working together in the otherwise solitary bush”—the typical situation of convict shepherds on far out-stations. “Men under these circumstances often stand by one another through thick and thin; in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his mate in anything.”53

Such feelings of trust and recognition could readily run between men who had shared the same experience of servitude.

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