This essay was published in 2023 as a chapter in the book Framing The Penal Colony. The book is stupidly expensive (£120) but is available online for those with university log-ins. If you want a digital version of my chapter please ask.
‘Dancing and discipline, frolics and felonies, punch and punishment, rum and reform’: Queen Victoria’s birthday party, Norfolk Island penal station, 25 May 1840
The penal colony has a long history as experiment. As Clare Anderson (2022: 8) has observed penal settlements were not only ‘used to occupy territories for economic and commercial reasons’ but were also ‘intertwined with global circulations of ideologies of punishment and rehabilitation’. Their remoteness, from both public scrutiny and immediate supervision, made them ideal locations to experiment. This chapter looks at what Norval Morris (2002: 177) has described as a ‘great penal experiment’: Alexander Maconochie’s trial, between 1840 and 1844, of his ‘mark system’ on Norfolk Island. Morris, like other accounts, portrays Maconochie’s regime as a progressive, humane and enlightened initiative that was brought to an end by reactionary opposition from the authorities in New South Wales and London (Barry 1958; Clay 2001). Maconochie’s (1848: 13) claim that ‘I found the Island a turbulent, brutal hell, and I left it a peaceful well ordered community’ has largely been accepted at face value. This was not, however, the response it received at the time from the New South Wales press, whose coverage was a mixture of ridicule and hostility.
This chapter introduces Maconochie and Norfolk Island, a remote penal settlement just over 1400 kilometres east of the British colony of New South Wales, before focusing on the early days of Maconochie’s experiment and, in particular, on a party he organised to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1840. On arrival on Norfolk Island he had detected animosity among the prisoners to both Britain and her institutions. The celebration was intended to address the convicts lack of patriotism, something Maconochie (1848: 8) feared represented a barrier to their successful rehabilitation. My account of the party is largely based on Maconochie’s own account and its coverage in the New South Wales press. Maconochie’s account was framed in the language of a theoretician, seeking to persuade by reason and with reference to the wider interests of the state in both the metropole and the colony. The Sydney press on the other hand framed their accounts in the dramatic, polemic language of outrage. These are followed by a review of the wider literature which shows that neither Maconochie’s nor the press’s accounts accurately reflect the reality of life on the island. To explain their very different accounts the chapter concludes by arguing that both Maconochie and the Sydney newspapers discourse need to be understood as ideological: Maconochie’s seeking to deploy reformative rhetoric to justify the penal expansion then occurring in England and the Sydney press advocating the terror of deterrence they believed necessary to maintain the emerging colonial social structure.
Maconochie originally travelled to the Australian penal colonies in 1836 as the private secretary to Sir John Franklin, the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Barry, 1958). Maconochie’s first career had been as a naval officer after which he was involved in the establishment of the London (subsequently Royal) Geographical Society, serving as its founding Secretary as well as Britain’s first Professor of Geography.[1] Before he left England for Van Diemen’s Land the Prison Disciplinary Society commissioned him to review the colony’s transportation system (Moore, 2011). His swiftly drafted report, alongside the largely unfavourable responses of local officials, was sent by Franklin to the Colonial Office. Maconochie also sent a summary of his findings to Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary. Russell saw the report’s relevance to the ongoing Molesworth Committee’s review of transportation and published Maconochie’s summary as a Parliamentary Paper (Home Office, 1838).[2] Subsequently the Colonial Office ordered the full set of dispatches to be printed for consideration by Molesworth and his committee (Colonial Office, 1838). Maconochie’s reports not only provided a damning indictment of the operation of the transportation system but also set out an innovative alternative penal theory, which was to become known as the mark system (Moore, 2011).
The mark system had five key characteristics. Firstly, Maconochie (1839: 6) declared that reformation, rather than deterrence, was punishment’s primary aim. Secondly, he advocated task rather than time sentences (Maconochie, 1839: i). Thirdly, marks were the currency which measured task achievements, rewarded desirable behaviour, punished misconduct and with which rations and indulgences were purchased (Home Office, 1838: 10). Fourthly, Maconochie advocated a staged approach to penal discipline with a clear division between the initial punitive stage and the subsequent reformative stages (Ibid: 9-10). Lastly, Maconochie did not tie his system to a specific institution; it was a theory of punishment with wider applications than ‘mere imprisonment’ (Maconochie, 1839: 19; 1846: 27). Accumulating the required balance of marks was the key to the prisoner’s release. However, marks also paid for provisions, so the convicts’ purchase of anything beyond bare necessities prolonged their incarceration. A refusal to co-operate resulted in a bread and water diet and an increasing debt to be paid off (Maconochie, 1853: 6). The system was designed so that release could not be obtained through endurance; Maconochie (1857: 1) intended to ‘uniformly subjugate all brought under its influences’ (emphasis in original). Convicts’ desire to complete their punishment, he believed, promoted behaviour that would become internalised. Good habits, Maconochie (1839: 24) hoped, would become ‘fetters which would be only the more effectual because they are unseen’.
Following the report of the Molesworth Committee significant changes were made to transportation (House of Commons, 1838). New South Wales ceased to be a destination for convicts in 1840 and in Van Diemen’s Land the assignment system was subsequently replaced by the probationary system (Reid, 2007). In England work commenced on the building of Pentonville prison, intended to provide a period of penitentiary confinement for convicts before their transportation to the Australian colonies.[3] Whilst the Molesworth Committee had not, as Maconochie often implied, endorsed his mark system, it had recommended a trial:
not as a substitute for the more perfect system which may be followed in well constructed penitentiaries, but as an experiment … in the hope of mitigating the evils which it is to be feared must unavoidably result from the associating together of offenders, until such buildings can be provided (House of Commons, 1838: xlv).
Therefore, whilst in London the penitentiary option at Pentonville was pursued, Maconochie was given the opportunity to trial his system on Norfolk Island.
An uninhabited island, originally claimed by Cook in 1774, Norfolk Island was settled in 1788 (Hoare, 1999: 6-7). Logistical problems caused by the Island’s remote location led to the settlement being abandoned in 1814 (Nobbs, 1988). However, in the 1820s it was decided to re-establish a penal station on Norfolk Island. The New South Wales Governor Ralph Darling (1922: 105) hoped for, ‘a place of the extremest punishment, short of Death’ while his predecessor as Governor, Thomas Brisbane (1917: 604) had desired felons there would be ‘for ever excluded from all hope of return.’ This extreme rhetoric contributed to the second settlement of Norfolk Island between 1825 and 1855 acquiring a reputation as a brutal, violent penal institution. The convicts on Norfolk Island have routinely been portrayed as predominantly reprieved capital convicts with histories of serious offending in both the British Isles and the Australian colonies (Hazzard, 1984; Hughes, 1987). Through a painstaking analysis of the convict records Causer (2010: 315) has determined that ‘the foundational myth that Norfolk Islanders were nearly all doubly-convicted capital respites is untrue’ and concludes that a majority were transported to Norfolk Island for non-violent thefts.
Maconochie arrived on the island on the 6 March 1840 aboard the Nautilus along with the first group of prisoners selected to participate in his experiment (Bateson, 1969: 373, 395).[4] He also took charge of the existing population of convicts sent there by Australian colonial courts. Maconochie had previously advised the Governor of New South Wales (and Maconochie’s line manager), Sir George Gipps that it would be impossible, on such a small island,[5] to run two separate regimes, an experimental one for the new prisoners and one based on the existing regulations for the colonial convicts,[6] whom he described as ‘1,200 of the refuse of both colonies’ (House of Commons, 1841: 10). His negative view of the colonial prisoners was reinforced on his arrival where his first impression of them was that they ‘were more like Demons than men’ (Maconochie, undated).
Maconochie was already well known in Australian colonial society through his contribution to the Molesworth committee. Responding to his appointment to run Norfolk Island the Sydney Herald (4 March 1840) highlighted his lack of practical experience of convict management, calling his appointment an example of ‘weathercock policy’ based on ‘mere theory’.The paper held out little hope for the success of his experiment, advising its readers that ‘his scheme of reformation is visionary in the extreme and will turn out to be nothing more than a waste of public money’ (Ibid). Condemning the government for appointing Maconochie the paper rejected ‘his peculiar views on discipline’ declaring that ‘Terror is the chief object of punishment’ before concluding:
It appears to us, that this plan is a tissue of undigested absurdities … it will inundate the country with speedily released felons, and it will cause the prisoners here to sigh after the pleasures of Norfolk Island … we feel confident the scheme will fail and cause the colonists an infinity of trouble to counteract the evils; and that it will entail an immense expense upon the community (Sydney Herald, 29 April 1840).
Maconochie was undisturbed by this opposition and on his arrival on the island took swift action to establish his reformative regime. He immediately issued a General Order setting out ‘the details of the system of discipline which he is directed to introduce into the settlement, and to which the prisoners landed from the Nautilus are to be immediately subjected’ (House of Commons, 1841: 52). The penal settlement was, he declared, to be converted ‘from a scene of prolonged suffering … into a field of moral reform’ (Ibid: 53). Maconochie made clear his view ‘that lengthened sentences are in every way injurious’ and declared that it would be his ‘pride and pleasure … rapidly to pass good men through the school of training’ (Ibid: 52-53). Despite acknowledging his lack of authority in determining the length of their sentences Maconochie announced that he would ‘strongly recommend’ to the Governor of New South Wales ‘that seven year sentences be made commutable for 6,000 marks, 10 years for 7,000, and 15 years and upwards for 8,000’ (Ibid: 53). He valued each mark at a penny, set the wages at ‘10 marks a day, or 60 marks a week, for ordinary day labour’ whilst allowing payment of ‘up to 16 marks a day for mechanical or any other superior labour’ (Ibid: 53). The order set out how, as well as purchasing freedom, marks could be deducted as fines for misconduct and expended on the purchase of certain indulgences (Ibid: 53).[7] The importance of deferred gratification was highlighted by Maconochie emphasising the need for the convicts to show restraint in their expenditure of marks whilst on the Island. Their whole future after release, he warned, ‘may take its character from the degree in which they avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by it of acquiring self-command’ (Ibid: 53). Although the regime he outlined was only to apply immediately to the new convicts, he assured the existing convict community that he intended swiftly to apply this regime to them (Ibid: 54).
In daily life, keeping the two sets of convicts separate was problematic and Maconochie rapidly concluded that maintaining the distinction between the two groups ‘enlisted every old prisoner on the island against me’ (House of Commons, 1841: 57). Whilst it is possible that the problems of maintaining separate regimes were overstated by Maconochie there is evidence that he was struggling to impose his authority. In the first week of his regime, he had had to revert to corporal punishment on three occasions, ‘to keep up the old system with the old hands’ (Ibid: 54). His solution was to extend his experimental regime to the old hands. He issued a second General Order declaring that:
After a week’s experience the superintendent finds the difficulty of maintaining two systems of discipline at the same time on the island almost insuperable, and the attempt, as he thinks, is even otherwise inexpedient. He has therefore resolved to put the mark system into full operation universally on Monday next, the 16th instant (Ibid: 54).
Ten days after Maconochie’s arrival, and without any authorisation, he extended his experiment to the old hands, their wages and mark regime established, and any effective distinction between the old establishment of colonially convicted prisoners and the new convicts had been removed (Ibid: 54-5).
Gipps reacted to Maconochie’s coup d’état with ‘surprise and apprehension’ and set out clearly the legal restrictions on releasing prisoners. He informed Maconochie that the extension of his experimental regime to the colonial prisoners was ‘illegal’ and should be immediately abandoned (House of Commons, 1841: 56). Maconochie was clearly shocked by the Governor’s response. Despite the reprimand giving him ‘very great pain’, he felt sure it was the result of a misunderstanding and he set out detailed explanations of his changes ‘calculated … to modify his Excellency’s opinions’ (Ibid: 57). The response from Sydney was curt:
his Excellency regrets he feels forced to say that the arguments contained in your letter have produced no alteration whatever in his opinion of the impropriety of the changes introduced by you in the management of the men on the old establishment at the island (Ibid: 59).
Maconochie had no choice but to concede defeat and for the remainder of his time on Norfolk Island he had to, at least nominally, operate two systems of discipline. Nevertheless, before he informed the convicts of Gipps order to withdraw the colonial prisoners from the experimental mark regime, he allowed them to participate in the celebrations he had planned for Queen Victoria’s birthday. These continued despite the clear apprehension felt in Sydney at the impact of Maconochie’s regime on the convict population of New South Wales. This was made explicit in a dispatch Maconochie received on the day he announced the celebrations of the Queen’s birthday, which informed him that Gipps ‘fears that the report of what is going on at Norfolk Island will destroy the salutary dread in which transportation to it has always been held among the convict population of New South Wales’ (Ibid: 57).
On Monday 25 May 1840, 80 days after Maconochie’s arrival, the penal settlement celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday. The convicts were issued with fresh meat and other ingredients, so they could be kept occupied in the morning preparing their food (Maconochie, 1848: 7). At noon, the prisoners sat down to dinner and Maconochie toured the island where at each station he reported that:
having previously mixed twenty gallons of rum[8] with two thousand half-pints of lemonade … I gave each man in succession, in my own presence, about half a tumbler of the mixture to drink the toast of the day. It scarcely smelt of spirits, and went, as was intended, to the hearts, not the heads, of those who drank it (Ibid: 7).
During the afternoon ‘every description of national game was engaged in, prizes being offered in each’ (Ibid: 7). In the early evening the convicts were called together for a concert during which
the performances were, the Castle of Andalusia, in which the comic powers of the prisoners were exhibited to their companions, a variety of glees and songs, the tent scene of Richard II, the Purse or the Benevolent Tar, and finally the national anthem (West, 1852: 284).
The convicts were allowed to be ‘at large’ for nearly two hours after dark to enable them to enjoy a firework display (House of Commons, 1841: 61). Maconochie proudly recorded that during this ‘not a shadow of disorder occurred’ and at ‘the appointed hour every man quietly returned to his ward’ (Maconochie, 1848: 8; House of Commons, 1841: 60). The events were viewed very differently in Sydney. Gipp’s reaction was scathing:
It is scarcely possible for his Excellency to conceive anything more calculated to produce mischievous effects among the large convict population of this colony … than to learn that men of their own class, who have been transported to Norfolk island for crimes of the most atrocious nature, are there entertained with the performance of plays, and regaled with punch, and he considers it his duty not to allow reports of such proceedings to reach them, without causing them at the same time to learn, that they have met with his marked disapprobation (Ibid: 62).
The following week the Sydney Herald (1 July 1840), declared the celebrations of the Queen’s birthday a ‘mockery of law, justice and order.’ According to the paper, ‘penal discipline was abandoned’ at the point that Maconochie issued his first general order and the ‘fete’ organised for the Queen’s Birthday had ‘put an end to the distinction between crime and good conduct’. Like Gipps the paper was concerned not to evaluate Maconochie’s innovations in terms of their reformative possibilities but was expressing their apprehension that Norfolk Island’s deterrence potential was being undermined. ‘The festivities and allurements of Norfolk Island’ were, they feared, a ‘monstrous injustice to every well behaved Convict in this colony’ and represented ‘a Bonus to crime’ (Sydney Herald, 1 July 1840, emphasis in original). New South Wales was still a colony heavily reliant on convict labour and maintaining discipline within this workforce, it was believed, relied on the fear of a sentence to Norfolk Island. What incentive would there be to the colony’s convict labour force to maintain its discipline, demanded the Herald (1 July 1840) if ‘the ruffian who adds Colonial atrocities to his prior British crimes, is sent to the refuge for criminals, and is treated to luxuries and indulgences’? It was, the newspaper declared, time that an end was ‘put to Captain Maconochie’s system’. In developing the press’s portrayal of the settlement’s regime repeated subsequent references were made to the 1840 Queen’s birthday celebrations. Two years later the Sydney Morning Herald[9] (5 May 1842) described Maconochie’s regime as ‘instructing them [the convicts] in the accomplishments of fiddling, dancing, drinking, rum-punch, enacting plays, and greeting the name of Her Most Gracious Majesty with loyal and lusty huzzas’. The island was a place of: ‘Dancing and discipline, frolics and felonies, punch and punishment, rum and reform’ (Ibid).
For the Australian Maconochie’s regime was the ‘mild and soothing system’ (21 December 1842) which was ‘most pernicious and injurious in its results’ (6 January 1842). The Sydney Morning Herald (5 May 1842) was blunter. The convict settlement was not it declared a prison but a ‘large boarding school’. On another occasion, it was ‘a penal Utopia – an Elysium of crime – an earthly hell aping the attributes of an earthly heaven!’ (Sydney Herald, 13 July 1841). It represented a ‘new-fangled method of fawning and crouching at the offenders’ feet’ which ‘it would be mockery to call it penal discipline’ (ibid, emphasis in original). The Sydney Herald suggested it was receiving first-hand accounts throughout Maconochie’s tenure. ‘The whole island, we understand, was in a disorganised state,’ it reported, before advising that ‘thefts were of everyday occurrence, while an unmentionable crime was prevalent to a degree that it is horrible to contemplate’ (Sydney Herald, 26 July 1841). The following week it cited a letter ‘from a gentleman resident there’ who claimed that:
The penal character of the place is completely done away with; while I am writing, some hundred convicts are assembled with a flag, amusing themselves at different games. It cannot be wondered at, that prisoners should commit crime for the sole purpose of being sent here’ (Sydney Herald 31 July 1841),
further evidence for the paper that ‘crime no doubt is increasing … The men think of little except crime and amusement.’
Underpinning much of this coverage was a fear of the eventual return of convicts to New South Wales. The Morning Chronicle (29 May 1844) warned of the dangers to the community of ‘the influx of the sort of characters let loose upon us by the crack-brained philosophy of Captain Maconochie.’ The Australian (6 January 1842) reminded its readers it was ‘to this Colony’s … shores Captain Maconochie’s patients are, after the period of their punishment, almost inevitably thrown.’ New South Wales residents were warned of ‘the serious evils’ that would inevitably result from ‘every five or six weeks … forty or fifty Norfolk Island expirees … (being) let loose upon us, at the caprice of a moon struck visionary like Captain Maconochie, who called them reformed’ (Morning Chronicle 22 May 1844, emphasis in original). It was ‘the very worst sort of transported felons’ that were being released in the colony where ‘they are ripe for the commission of the heaviest crimes’ (Morning Chronicle 22 May 1844; Australian, 6 January 1842). Much of the press coverage demonised the prisoners with, for example, the Australian (21 December 1842) referring to the ‘trebly-convicted felons confined on the island’. Although we now know that those incarcerated on the island were predominately relatively minor non-violent lawbreakers, the risk they were portrayed as representing was substantial (Causer, 2010: 315). The Australian (6 January 1842) warned its readers that on release ‘these old offenders’ … in almost every instance, betake themselves, immediately upon their arrival in Sydney, to the commission of every sort of crime’. The consequence of the ‘mistaken’ trial conducted by Maconochie was, they declared, ‘to deluge the Colony from time to time, with large numbers of unreformed criminals’ (Australian, 6 January 1842). Not only were crimes by released Norfolk Islanders given prominence in the press, but other crimes were wrongly attributed to former Norfolk Island prisoners and unsolved crimes were presumed to have been perpetrated by former Norfolk Island convicts (see for example Sydney Morning Herald, 21 December 1842). This crime wave was the direct result of ‘this madman’s pranks’ (Sydney Herald, 31 July 1841).
By drawing on Maconochie’s own writings and reports published in the Sydney press two very distinct pictures have emerged. To Maconochie Norfolk Island was a successful and well managed penal establishment reforming its convicts, whilst to the press Norfolk Island had ‘lost its penal character’ (Sydney Herald, 29 April 1840). In fact, neither picture is particularly accurate. In reality Maconochie’s Norfolk Island regime was poorly administered and characterised by conflict, poor productivity, attempts to escape and, over time an increasingly heavy reliance on corporal punishment. Maconochie’s firm conviction in his theories meant that from the outset he focused on promoting their merits rather than getting to grips with the practical tasks involved in running a remote penal settlement. His correspondence with the New South Wales government often reads like a lecture, setting out, in considerable detail, his penal theory and his aspirations with little concern for practicalities. He casually dismissed clear instructions on the basis that they misunderstood what he was actually doing. It was a practice he continued despite the Colonial Secretary bluntly telling him his missives were ‘both tedious and unsatisfactory’ (cited in Causer, 2021: 6). This inability to accept criticism and advice was replicated in many of his relationships on the island.
Tim Causer (2021: 30, 7) has highlighted how Maconochie fell out with, among others, the island’s Superintendent of Agriculture Charles Ormsby (whom it was alleged, in an attempt to undermine Maconochie’s regime, had enticed a convict to steal government sheep); his successor William Pery (whom Maconochie alleged had run an illegal still); both Anglican and Catholic clergymen; and James Reid, a medical officer, (whom Maconochie promised an increase in salary to act for a period as his assistant, but which was never paid). Maconochie’s high opinion of himself and his theories were not shared by others. Reid referred to Maconochie in a letter to a friend as ‘His Highmightiness –& his Holiness’, whilst John Smith, the Assistant Commissary General observed that he ‘fancies himself supreme’, and Thomas Sharpe, the protestant chaplain, recorded in his journal his concerns about the ‘pestiferous influence’ of the mark system on the convicts (all cited in Causer, 2021: 7). Whilst, for many prisoners Maconochie’s innovations would have been welcome and improved their lives, others were more critical. The Norfolk Gazette, an underground convict publication satirised Maconochie and his regime, referring to him as the penal settlement’s ‘Lord Chamberlain’ and its ‘Commander in Chief (Not at Horse Guards) (cited in Causer, 2021: 8).[10] More significantly, the repeated attempts to abscond suggest that some convicts were highly motivated to escape the pains of being confined there. Of the seven successful escape attempts in the history of the second settlement, four occurred in Maconochie’s time (Causer, 2010: 225, 333). There were further attempts, including, most famously, the attempt to seize the brig Governor Philip, which resulted in the death of four convicts in the struggle on the boat and subsequently another four on the gallows (Naylor, 1872: 3-4, 13-15; The Australian Friday 15 July 1842). It is clear that for some convicts, the strong likelihood of death was a risk worth taking to escape Norfolk Island, Maconochie’s reformative regime notwithstanding.
Although it is likely that Maconochie’s poor record keeping masks the full picture, the settlement’s disciplinary records show that the island was neither Maconochie’s ‘well ordered community’ nor the ‘mild and soothing system’ portrayed in the Sydney press.[11] A return Maconochie submitted in April 1842, two years into his experiment, showed the range of behaviours that were being punished (Maconochie, 1843: 20-22). The largest group of offences were those that we might categorise as forms of resistance, such as disobedience, insolence, refusing to bathe, abusive language, failing to co-operate with the regime and offences relating to absence, including from the camp, from work, from muster, from prayers and on occasions for breaking out of the stockade. The only other category of offences that occurred on any scale where those relating to property, such as robbery and theft, both from the government and from other prisoners. There were also a few offences of violence, a false confession of a murder and a handful of offences related to homosexuality (Ibid). Although Maconochie’s theory used mark fines as the method of disciplining convicts, in these returns these were supplemented by both carceral and corporal punishments. Sixteen of the return’s 24 men had been sentenced to terms in gaol and one had been subject to a corporal punishment. Interestingly, although fines were being used extensively it was clear that imprisonment was the primary disciplinary method, with many convicts being repeatedly imprisoned (Ibid). In fact, the use of imprisonment had become so routine that Maconochie admitted that it was not always being recorded, with one prisoner ‘also imprisoned for several other offences, but which are not recorded’ (Ibid: 21). Whereas in theory Maconochie had been confident that his mark system could operate purely through mark rewards and punishments, these records show that in his experimental regime he depended on other, particularly carceral, punishments in order to maintain control. The nature of the transgressions that this group were being punished for, with the preponderance of offences of resistance, is also significant. It suggests that for this group of prisoners Maconochie had failed to achieve his ambition of aligning the interests of prisoners with that of the regime. Despite John Barry (1958: 144) claiming that Maconochie did not flog any of the new hands, Causer (2010: 248) has shown this to be untrue, with at least 36 beatings being inflicted on the new prisoners. Despite the number of floggings appearing to have decreased under Maconochie, his regime remained underpinned by his deployment of violence to enforce his control. Causer (2010: 246-7) reports that Maconochie ordered floggings of up to 200 lashes and that ‘floggings inflicted under Maconochie were of a greater intensity … than any other commandant’.
The central role of work in convict reformation in Maconochie’s mark system would suggest that his experiment would have increased the island’s productivity (Moore, 2018). However, in an analysis of the penal settlement’s economy, Malcolm Treadgold (1991: 87) identified ‘a falling-off in effort or in the intensity of work undertaken by the convicts as a major factor in the declining agricultural production’ during Maconochie’s time as Supervisor. Indeed, there is clear evidence that, despite a significant increase in the prisoner population under Maconochie, agricultural production from government-cultivated land declined. This was most evident in the levels of production of maize and wheat. In 1840, 27,078 bushels of maize were grown on the Island; by 1843 this had declined to 8,379 bushels with each acre under production producing 13 bushels, compared with the 33 per acre that had been produced in 1840 (Maconochie, 1845: 5). The reduction in wheat grown from 3,442 to 544 bushels during these years was even more dramatic and reflected the reduced acreage cultivated, which declined from 237 to 34 during the period (Ibid: 5).
Although the reality of life on Maconochie’s Norfolk Island was very different from both his description and the colonial press’s portrayal, both discourses had purpose. At a superficial level this conflict can be seen as a dispute, still ongoing, over the purpose of state punishment. Is it justified on the basis it is deserved? Or does it protect society by deterring future criminals, incapacitating the dangerous or reforming the anti-social? Such perspectives presume penal law is merely a response to crime. However, a historical sociological perspective on punishment suggests state punishment performs specific social functions, at particular times and in particular places. For Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939: 5) ‘(e)very system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships.’ The history of punishment, they argue, is therefore intrinsically linked to changing social structures, with the specific punishments deployed in any epoch largely determined by the prevailing economic relations. It therefore follows that penal strategies will not only change across time but vary across place. Michel Foucault (2019: 106, 102) further developed this analysis to argue that penal law’s ‘main function is anti-seditious’, it is a political strategy aimed not at delinquency, but at repressing ‘the struggle of the people against power’. To therefore understand the functionalism of the discourses of both Maconochie’s and the New South Wales press we need to look at the social structures, and penal economies, of both metropolitan England and colonial Australia.
Over the previous century England had undergone dramatic social and economic change. The industrial revolution, commercial expansion and the enclosure movement fundamentally changed English society (Thompson, 1991: 66). Economic change re-organised society with inequality and poverty increasing alongside, for a minority, great wealth. In the countryside, ‘the introduction of liberalism on the land … shattered the social structure’, forcing many to relocate to urban centres (Hobsbawn 1995: 159). The stability and mutual obligations of the old moral economy was replaced by ‘a society of strangers’ (Ignatieff, 1983: 87). These changes were not uncontested, and the first half of the nineteenth century saw organised struggle as well as widespread individual acts of resistance (Thompson, 1991). Whilst the revisionist histories of the 1970s suggested that between 1780 and 1850 there was a move from corporal to carceral punishments recent empirical work has shown that in respect to England all modes of state punishment – imprisonment, transportation, corporal, and capital punishments – underwent a dramatic increase (Ignatieff, 1983; Moore, 2021). To justify the increased punishment of those who (willingly or unwillingly) were perceived as resisting the new order, the doctrine of deterrence, which had previously dominated theological and philosophical justifications of state punishment, was increasingly supplemented by reformative aspirations (Wiener, 1990). Whereas deterrence justifications had viewed punishment as a necessary evil, to be kept to the absolute minimum, reformatory rationalisations saw it ‘as medicine for the individual, as well as protection for the community’ (Bentham, 1843: 390; Maconochie, 1847: 2).
For many in England nineteenth-century criminal justice system was ‘an arena of unequal negotiation and despair’, whose focus on the protection of property increasingly led to its legitimacy being questioned (Gatrell, 1994: vi). Maconochie (1839: 15) recognised penal law’s vulnerability to such criticisms, conceding that its administration ‘undoubtedly contributes to alienate the two classes’. In response, he highlighted his system’s capacity to generate ‘a general improvement … in the relations and feelings of high and low towards each other in England’ (Maconochie, 1839: 14-15). His ideas, he argued, offered the penal system not only legitimacy, but the capacity to reconcile those subjected to it to their place within the desired economic and moral order. The mark system, Maconochie (1839: 16) argued, would enable state punishment to ‘sow the seed, not only of future good conduct, but of warm attachment, both to the agents who have been employed [in administrating the punishment], and the interests which they have served!’ Maconochie’s ideas, and their reception therefore need to be understood as a political response to England’s expanding penal system’s need for legitimacy. Reformation, and parties that celebrated the Queen’s birthday, in that context made sense.
However, New South Wales was still a convict colony, with a social structure characterised by divisions: between convict and free labour; indigenous peoples and colonial settler; emancipists and free immigrants; military and civilian. Its European population was dispersed over a large and (from a colonial settler perspective) rapidly expanding land mass. Although property could be acquired relatively rapidly its owners hold over it was often precarious. In such a society, the law was central to both the protection of property and the maintenance of the social hierarchy. In this setting Maconochie’s theory, which saw criminals as morally defective individuals who needed treatment, made little sense. Those with property believed they faced a greater threat from a much wider section of the population. At a deep psychological level, they needed the law to provide them with the comfort of knowing that it had the capacity to react with severity towards those who failed to respect property rights or otherwise threatened the status quo. It was not the ‘defective’ nature of individual criminals but the perceived threat of a whole class that needed responding to. That required a terror that reformative rhetoric, and celebrations of the Queen’s birthday, threatened.[12] Whilst the colonial government had to balance the competing pressures coming from the government in London – who supported an experiment that offered the potential legitimisation of the metropole’s expanding penal economy – and the emerging local colonial bourgeoisie – whose interests required a penality that terrorised – no such balance was required by the local press. Their opposition to Maconochie’s experiment was relentless and uncompromising.
Maconochie’s experiment and the ideas that underpinned it hold a central place in both the history of penal reform and the development of the discipline of criminology. However, his experiment on Norfolk Island proved unsustainable. Although its immediate success has been exaggerated it should nevertheless be recognised as an important attempt to use reformative ideas to legitimise state punishment. Whilst the idea of reformation has subsequently played a central role in the rhetoric of penal law it was inappropriate for New South Wales colonial society. As Georg Rusche (1978: 4) has highlighted, ‘all efforts to reform the punishment of criminals are inevitably limited by the situation of the lowest socially significant proletarian class which society wants to deter from criminal acts.’ In the colonial context, the significant ‘proletarian class’ were convicts. For the editors of Sydney’s newspapers, they were not a class likely to be deterred by ‘(d)ancing and discipline, frolics and felonies, punch and punishment, rum and reform’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 May 1842). The New South Wales press were not interested in giving Maconochie and his experiment a fair trial, they understood that the interests of the colonial bourgeois required a penal policy based on deterrence. By promoting reformation rather than seeking to terrorise, Maconochie regime was seen, and responded to, as a direct threat to these interests. For Rusche (1978: 4) ‘reform efforts, however humanitarian and well-meaning, which attempt to go beyond this restriction are condemned to utopianism.’ Queen Victoria’s Birthday party confirmed, at least for the Sydney press, that Maconochie’s regime was utopianism and they were unwavering in their commitment to its failure.
References
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Footnotes
[1] Alongside the other founders of the RGS, Maconochie saw himself as a ‘political geographer’ participating in an applied discipline facilitating the expansion of British colonialism and trade. (See for example his earlier geographical publications: M’Konochie, 1816; 1818). For the relationship between Maconochie, colonialism and carceral geography see: https://jmmoore.org/2020/05/03/not-without-irony/ .
[2] The Molesworth Committee, which reported in 1838, was a British parliamentary committee set up to review transportation to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Island.
[3] Between its opening in 1842 and 1849, Pentonville received only prisoners sentenced to transportation, almost exclusively ‘those who were convicted of their first offence, and whose ages were generally between 18 and 35’ (Graham, 1850: 3).
[4] Like all the prisoners on Norfolk Island during its second settlement (1825-1855) Maconochie’s convicts were male.
[5] Norfolk Island is just under 35 square kilometres in area.
[6] The colonial convicts were nearly all originally from the British Isles. Causer’s (2010: 82, 78) detailed examination of the convict records has identified, that, out of a total of 5,941 convicts. ‘Eight Aboriginal men were detained at Norfolk Island, as were five Chinese, a fair few Americans and continental Europeans, as well as men from Mauritius, India and the West Indies’.
[7] For the influence of political economy on Maconochie’s theories see Moore (2018).
[8] Based on a convict population of 1,800 this worked out at just over 50ml each, or slightly over a modern-day English pub’s double measure.
[9] The Sydney Herald was renamed the Sydney Morning Herald in 1842.
[10] When Maconochie was subsequently appointed as governor of Birmingham prison in England his tenure was also characterised by conflict with both local magistrates and other officers within the prison. For a full account see Moore (2016).
[11] Causer (2010: 233) has highlighted that the available data on punishments during Maconochie’s period is ‘a definite underestimation due to significant gaps in the conduct records for this period’.
[12] This need for a penality of terror may help to explain why official and media discourse consistently promoted the myth of the dangerous double-convicted capital offenders, despite most prisoners being non-violent minor property offenders (Causer, 2010).
Trincomalee walks 