The Cruel Overseer, John Price: an Excerpt from “The Fatal Shore”

(L) Robert Hughes (1936-2012), Photo: halloffame.melbournepressclub.com (R) The Fatal Shore

by (the late) Robert Hughes

Editor’s Note: A reader has asked me to run this biography of John Price, a colonial figure who met an interesting end. It is from Robert Hughes’ masterpiece, The Fatal Shore, a history of Australia in the convict days. Copyright 1986. I have abridged it.

On October 13, the men were hanged in two sets of six on the gallows that looked over Kingston beach and the Pacific beyond, before the assembled convicts, with all the military standing by with primed muskets to crush any restiveness.* No voices were raised but those of the condemned, who joined together in singing a hymn. Rogers had sat up all night with them, praying; he and the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Bond, walked with the men to the scaffold, where their irons were struck off although their arms remained “severely pinioned.” The trapdoor crashed, the bodies fell, the ropes thrummed on the beams. The mutineers’ corpses were cut down, coffined, loaded unceremoniously into bullock-carts and dumped in an old sawpit outside the consecrated ground of the cemetery, by the sea’s edge.

WITH THIS MASS execution, the career of the most notorious of all the commandants of Norfolk Island began.
John Giles Price (1808–1857) was the fourth son of a Cornish baronet, Sir Rose Price of Trengwainton. A family fortune had been raised on sugar and slaves in the Caribbean, but by John Price’s time it was all dissipated and he was only one of fourteen children begotten by this philoprogenitive minor aristocrat.

Out he went to the colonies in 1836, a man in his late twenties armed with good letters of introduction but little capital. But in the pathologically snobbish society of Hobart Town, letters and a dash of noble blood counted for a lot. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur gave Price a generous land grant on the Huon River and more assigned servants than most new arrivals could expect. In 1838 Price married the niece of Arthur’s successor, Mary Franklin.

His farm was successful and his skill at running assigned convicts was noted. He was appointed muster-master of the Convict Department, then assistant police magistrate. His wife bore him five children in rapid succession. Price’s colonial future was assured, despite a bout of illness after he moved to Hobart Town to take up his administrative duties.

He was praised for his abilities as a classical scholar, athlete and oarsman; he was a skilled carpenter, turner, blacksmith, locksmith and tinker; he could even cook and sew; and, like some camp commandants in Europe a century later, he loved children. But it was his reputation for being tough and methodical that caused poor Eardley-Wilmot, in casting around for someone to redeem Norfolk Island from the miseries of Childs’s incompetence, to pick Price. Eardley-Wilmot got more than he bargained for.

John Price has remained one of the durable ogres of the Australian imagination for more than a century now. This was largely because he was the original of the brutal island commandant Maurice Frere in the Great Australian Novel of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life.

“You know me, don’t you? I am come here to rule, and by God I’ll do so and tame or kill you. I know you are cowardly dogs, and I’ll

make you worry and eat one another.”

Such were Price’s first words to his “lambs,” on his first visit to the Kingston barracks in 1846.
When Clarke changed Price’s name to Frere in his novel, it was not a casual gesture. Frère, of course, means “brother,” and Price’s peculiar relationship to the convicts fascinated Clarke. Unlike all previous commandants, Price went to great lengths to deal with them as an insider. He learned their flash argot and always spoke to them in it, with none of the slips and malapropisms that betray a man using a foreign tongue. How had he learned it? Nobody knew, and many of the prisoners on Norfolk Island apparently believed that he had “done time” himself.

He was rumored to have lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence in the doss-houses and kens of Hobart Town, mixing freely with hard cases who accepted him as one of them. There were also some missing years in England, from 1827 (when he matriculated at Brasenose College in Oxford, though without taking a degree) to 1836, when he sailed for Van Diemen’s Land. …

There was, for instance, no doubt that the brief mutiny of July 1, 1846, was a protest against semistarvation. Price knew this perfectly well, for his first act after the mutineers were hanged was to increase the rations at the Kingston barracks. But at the end of 1846, Price cynically explained to William Champ, the comptroller-general in Van Diemen’s Land, that the outbreak was caused by sodomy. Without their confiscated kettles, the prisoners could not make culinary treats for “the objects of their lusts, and . . . this aroused their savage and ferocious passions to a pitch of madness.”

By turns fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of convict evil, Price set himself up as its authoritarian mirror and, as his biographer John Barry remarked, entered “a psychopathological love-hate relationship” with the prisoners of Norfolk Island. He had to dominate them by their own standards, to show that he was their master, even without the backing of the System. Hence his obsession with knowing the convicts: their slang, the way they thought, their desires. To speak their language was to demoralize them, to show that their world was open to him while his remained closed to them. …

Price ruled by terror, informers and the lash, to which he added the public force of his own indomitable character; he was known to walk into the lumber-yard unescorted and, before five hundred hostile men, face down a convict who showed signs of rebellion. He once stared down a convict who snatched the pistol from his belt, taunting the man as a coward and a dog, until the prisoner handed back the weapon and fell beaten to his knees.

The informer system had been usual on Norfolk Island long before Price arrived there; so, of course, had the lash. The question in assessing Price’s regime is how far he went in arbitrary cruelty and despotic abuse, beyond the degree of “responsible” brutality that the government expected a Norfolk Island commandant to deploy. …

Rogers’s first charge was that Price’s transactions with the convicts on Norfolk Island were cynical. Price did not believe that reformation was possible; he assumed that good behavior was a sham and that everything any prisoner said about his own state of mind or moral progress was a lie. “Whenever a fellow is recommended to me by the religious instructor or the surgeon superintendent,” Price declared, “I always set that fellow down as the greatest hypocrite of the whole lot.”

In 1846 the transport John Calvin landed its 199 prisoners on Norfolk Island to begin their trudge through the Probation System, and one convict was recommended by the surgeon superintendent as “an inoffensive man with very fine feelings.” “Oh, I’ll soon take them out of him!” Price replied….

Everyone who showed signs of opposing his autocratic rule was suspended or recalled to Hobart, until no one stood between Price and the prisoners. Rogers, before he had to leave in 1847, recorded the pervasive terror of informants Price fostered and the capriciousness with which prisoners could be punished. One prisoner was flogged for mislaying his shoelaces. A man named Peart got seven days in chains for saying “good morning” to the wrong person.

Another was seen walking along waving a twig; a constable saw him and demanded to know what he was up to and where he was going. “Why, I might be after a parrot,” the prisoner replied, and was flogged. It had been the custom among the convicts to wash the back of a newly flogged man, to press down his mangled skin and dress it with cool banana leaves; Price had anyone seen with a banana leaf in his possession summarily punished.

Punishments for less trivial offenses were in proportion; and Price’s orders were meticulously carried out by his chief constable, a ticket-of-leave man named Alfred Essex Baldock (1821–1848), whom Rogers called “of most unprincipled disposition . . . perfidious and unfeeling towards his fellow-prisoners . . . the servile creature of the commandant in everything.” Some men, after flogging, would be laced into a strait-jacket and tied down to an iron bedstead for a week or two, so that their backs mortified and stank. Others were “strapped down” without a flogging, but for as much as six weeks at a time, after which the victim “looked more like a pale distended corpse than a living being, and his voice . . . could scarcely be heard.”

Cells were frequently whitewashed to cover the blood which, Rogers alleged, spattered the walls to a height of seven feet. In one fetid punishment cell, known as the “Nunnery,” Price would keep a dozen men with a latrine-bucket in a space six by twelve feet when the outside temperature was 100°F.; “I had to step out into the yard at first,” Rogers confessed, “to save myself from fainting.” Men were sentenced to work “on the reef,” cutting coral in water up to their waists, in 36-pound leg-irons; they were condemned to fourteen days’ solitary for “having some ravelling from an old pair of trousers,” or “being at the privy when the bell rang.”

Price defended his “severities,” without (of course) going into detail about them, on the ground the prisoners were wild beasts who would rise and take the island if they got an inch of slack. Rogers disagreed: Except for some twenty or thirty “villains,” the two thousand prisoners “were as manageable by the common methods of just and firm and rational government as the peasantry of Kent or Devon.”

The commandant had his wife and children on the island, but his “constant companion,” according to Rogers, was Baldock, who went “riding with him to out-stations and shepherds’ huts in the bush, and attending him and advising him constantly.” Rogers seems to have thought that the two men were lovers, and that this explained Baldock’s invulnerability to reproof. In Van Diemen’s Land, former officers of Baldock’s probation gang assured Rogers that “he was so strongly suspected of being addicted to unnatural crime that he was ordered to be placed at nights in one of the sleeping cells.”

There is no conclusive evidence of a liaison between Price and Baldock, although when the chief constable was drowned (to the unbounded joy of the prisoners) after his rowboat turned turtle on the Kingston reef, Price set up an unusually large and elaborate gravestone to him, much in contrast to the mass grave of Murderers’ Mound, with the grieving quatrain:

“Tis His Supreme prerogative O’er subject Kings to reign.

’Tis just that he should rule the world Who does the world sustain.”

Price’s rule grew worse as his paranoia thickened, and in 1852 he received a dispatch from Denison’s desk querying the enormous inflictions of the lash he himself had reported. His Excellency, Price learned, “regrets very much that you should have considered such punishment necessary to so great an extent” and “trusts that you may . . . adopt . . . means of enforcing proper discipline without recourse to such frequent infliction of this mode of punishment.”

In reply, Price railed against the character of the convicts —“cullings,” “incorrigibles,” “desperadoes,” among whom “persuasion is useless, advice is thrown away.” … But in that month, March 1852, Bishop Willson was moved by rumor and report to make his third visit to Norfolk Island. He was appalled by what he saw there and penned a thirty-page report to Lieutenant-Governor Denison. It described mass floggings, blood-soaked earth, and an atmosphere of “gloom, sullen despondency, despair of leaving the Island.”

He saw hideously overcrowded cells, men loaded with 36-pound balls on their chains, wizened pallid creatures staring at him “with their bodies placed in a frame of iron work.” He found the sole medical officer so much in cahoots with Price that he claimed a desperately sick prisoner had to be kept in an airless cell because ventilation would be “prejudicial” to him. Hampton, in turn, tried to discredit Bishop Willson’s report with obfuscations and quibbles. Price burst into tears and begged the Bishop to suppress his report. But Willson filed it, placing the blame squarely on Price and “the system which invests one man at this remote place with absolute, I might say irresponsible power of dealing with so large a mass of human beings.”

Price had tendered his resignation once, at the end of 1850, citing the difficulty of bringing up his children well in “this Lazar house of crime.” He got a raise in salary instead. But by now, Denison feared he might become a serious embarrassment to the Crown. He felt that there was a connection between Price’s “illness”—whose nature was not specified in official correspondence—and the morbid ferocities of his rule.

Denison had already cut the size of the convict population of Norfolk Island by half in 1847, in deference to Grey’s wish to abandon the island altogether; most of the probation prisoners had gone down to Van Diemen’s Land, leaving a hard core of about 450 “colonial” or twice-convicted offenders. But the military force on Norfolk Island had not been reduced, and very expensive it was, while civilian officers could not be found at any price, because of the rush to the newly discovered goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo.*

In any case, Denison could read the larger political signs, all of which pointed to the abolition of transportation to Australia. It would be better to get rid of this remote penal outrider and concentrate all the management of convicts on Van Diemen’s Land. Denison therefore ordered his Convict Department to start drawing up plans for a maximum-security penitentiary at Port Arthur, modelled on the Separate System of Pentonville—which would receive the hard cases of Norfolk Island….

Price farmed for a while, but he could not keep away from prison management. Within a year, in January 1854, he accepted a job on the mainland as inspector-general of penal establishments in Victoria. One of his tasks was to run the five prison hulks moored in the port of Melbourne, at Hobson’s Bay off Williamstown.

The regime on these vessels became a new byword for ferocity. The worst of Norfolk Island had come to the mainland: the tube-gagging and spread-eagling, the bludgeon-handle jammed in the mouth in tobacco searches, the rotten victuals, the loading with irons, the beatings, ringbolts and buckets of sea water. Before long, a warship had to take up station next to the hulks, its guns double-shotted so that, if the prisoners mutinied and the guards had to flee, it could sink the hulk and send its ironed men to the bottom.

On March 26, 1857, Price paid an official visit to the quarry at Williamstown where gangs of hulk convicts were laboring. He had come, as his office demanded, to hear their grievances; and with his usual bravado, he walked straight into the midst of them, escorted only by a small party of guards. A hundred prisoners watched him marching up the tramway that bore the quarried stone from the cutting-face to the jetty. Quietly they surrounded Price, and their circle began to close.

There was a hubbub of hoarse voices, a clatter of chains, a scraping of hobnails on stone. Rocks began to fly. The guards fled; Price turned and began to run down the tramway when a stone flung from the top of the quarry-face caught him between the shoulder blades and pitched him forward on his face. Then, nothing could be seen except a mass of struggling men, a frenetic scrum of arms and bodies in piebald cloth, and the irregular flailing of stone-hammers and crowbars.