penal system, excerpted from 'The Fatal Shore' by Robert
Hughes (pp 591-593). This Irish convict's story is perhaps
extraordinary, but the book details many such episodes from
a system that was designed to terrorize its inmates, in hopes
of terrorizing and dissuading potential inmates back in
England and Ireland.//
How they got there.
"The famous British author Anthony Trollope visited Tasmania
(formerly Van Diemen's Land) in 1872 and interviewed one of the
last 15 remaining prisoners at the penal settlement Port Arthur in
January of that year. The prisoner was an Irishman from
Londonderry named Dennis Doherty, 'one of the heroes of the
place... who told us that for forty-two years he had never been a
free man for an hour.'
Doherty was tall, heavily tattooed, with a large cleft chin and one
small grey eye. He had enlisted in the 16th Lancers as a boy, and
he was still a lad of eighteen in May 1833 when a court-martial in
Guernsey sentenced him to 14 years' transportation for desertion.
From that point on, he traversed the whole of the (Australian penal)
System.
The Australian Penal Archipelago.
In 1837 the Sydney Supreme Court sentenced him to life
imprisonment on Norfolk Island as a bushranger. After four years,
he feigned madness well enough to be repatriated to Sydney. He
was reconvicted at Berrima Quarter Sessions, in New South Wales,
for bushranging in 1841, and returned to Norfolk Island for his
second life sentence. A year later, he went on the Probation System
to Port Arthur. In 1844 he was sent back among the hard cases to
Norfolk Island. On the way he tried to seize the brig Governor
Phillip, for which he received his third life sentence.
In 1853 Doherty returned to Van Diemen's Land, or Tasmania as it
was now called, to serve out the rest of his probation. Two years
later, he received his fourth life sentence for assaulting a man with
a stolen gun. And so it had gone. Over the years, Doherty told the
astonished Trollope, he had received more than 3,000 lashes. 'In
appearance', the writer noted, 'he was a large man and still powerful,
well to look at in spite of his eye, lost as he told us through the
miseries of prison life. But he said that he was broken at last.'
Doherty had made his last escape attempt three weeks before and
had been brought back 'almost starved to death':
'He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting
against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a
whole life of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there
he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while
the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in
his old age. He said 'I have tried to escape; always to escape, as a
bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?'
'The man's first offense, that of mutiny (sic), is not one at which
the mind revolts. I did feel for him, and when he spoke of
himself as a caged bird, I should have liked to take him out into
the world, and have given him a month of comfort. He would
probably, however, have knocked my brains out at the first
opportunity. I was assured that he was thoroughly bad, irredeemable,
not to be reached by any kindness, a beast of prey, whose hand was
against every honest man, and against whom it was necessary that
every honest man should raise his hand. Yet he talked so gently
and so well, and argued his case with such winning words! He was
writing in a book when we entered his cell...'Just scribbling, sir, to
while away the hours' he said.'
Dennis Doherty was then fifty-seven, and his conduct record, which
Trollope had not been able to see, bears out what he said of his life.
It is a litany of almost inconceivable suffering and defiance, pages
long - lashes, chains, gang labor, solitary confinement, for offenses
that ran from 'absconding' to 'mutiny' to 'having a crayfish in his
possession without authorization.'
Anthony Trollope
Trollope in Australia click here for info about Trollope's
tour of Australia (1871-1872)
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