[QUOTE TAKEN FROM SIGN AT SALTWATER COAL MINE]
The white history of Australia is inextricably linked to the incarceration, transportation, punishment and torture of the criminal detritus of the British Empire. New South Wales (around Sydney), isolated Norfolk Island and Van Diemen's Land (rebranded as Tasmania to cleanse the stain) were major sites of settlement and incarceration.
Hard labour, starvation rations, arbitrary punishment and torture were common - a very British anticipation of the more commonly recognised horrors of twentieth century Nazi concentraion camps and Soviet gulags.
Amidst the horror, homosexuality was rife - both consensual and loving, and coercive and abusive.
What follows are some extracts from Robert Hughes' book 'The Fatal Shore' in which he considers Australia's homo-convict heritage. The titles are my own. The photos were taken at Port Arthur and Saltwater River Coal Mines in Tasmania - two sites which remember some of the darkest days of the British Empire.
AUSTRALIA : A PENAL COLONY"...one would naturally suppose that, in a remote colony whose proportion of men to women varied between 4 to 1 in the city and 20 to 1 in the bush, homosexuality would have flourished. So it did, expecially on the chain gangs and the outer penal settlements..."
NORFOLK ISLAND"...an official report by Robert Pringle Stuart, a convict department magistrate in Norfolk [Island], described how convicts called themselves "man and wife", that there were probably 150 such couples, not counting more casual attachments, and that they would not bear to be separated..."
"...Bishop Ullathorne, visiting Norfolk Island in 1835-56 heard at second hand that "two-thirds of the island were implicated" in homosexual activity..."
"...in no less heated terms, [Robert Pringle] Stuart reported to his superiors in Van Dieman's Land in 1846 that Norfolk Island under the lax, vaciliating sway of Major Childs had become a citadel of sodomy..."
A MORAL CONTAGION
"...convict homosexuality seemed, from [Robert Pringle] Stuart's perspective, to be the quintessential form on convict evil..."
"...the danger seemed to be that this contagion [homosexuality] would spread unchecked like an epidemic disease from...[Norfolk Island]...to the mainland of Australia..."
"...ever since the probation system had been installed, lobbyists had been harping on a subject repugnant to the Victorian sense of public morality...[homosexuality]..."
VAN DIEMAN'S LAND (FORMER NAME FOR TASMANIA)"...Francis Russel Nixon, Bishop of Van Diemen's Land...quoted letters from dispairing gang chaplains that..parties of convicts slunk off together into the bush to gratify their lusts. In the "trench"...(ordinary prison barracks)..in Hobart Town, where twelve hundred were kept. "The most disgusting crimes that ever stained the character of men are perpetrated....."
"...[Robert Pringle] Stuart paid it a surprise visit [to the convicts housing] at eight o'clock one hot night and saw a flurry of "men scrambling into their own beds from others, in a hurried manner, concealment being evidently their object." Prostitution was widespread; lads sold themselves for tobacco, new boots, or a lump of bread kneaded together with fat. Rape was not merely common, but inevitable..."
"...thanks to those isolated gangs to toiling degenerate men, Van Diemen's Land was now a hotbed of sodomy..."
THE OTHER SIDE OF MATESHIP"...life in the outback.....promoted the pair-bonding, the feeling of reliance on one's "mate" that would lie forever at the heart of masculine social behavior in Australia. Because there were no white women in the bush, it meant - as some authorities grudgingly acknowledged, by the end of the 1830s - that "mateship" found it's expression in homosexuality..."
"...sodomy was a capital crime. In the eyes of the law, sodomy deserved death; but in the eyes of social custom, especially the customs of English and Irish working people, it was more than ordinarily loathsome..."
"...[however]...not until 1796 was anyone in Australia charged with a homosexual offense..."
"... but after 1830 the documents are full of references to it - for that was the decade in which the movement to abolish transportation....began to take steam..."
"...obviously most lovers were not caught., hence statistics on sodomy from the penal period are of little use..."
"...over the period 1829-35 in New South Wales and Van Dieman's Island, only tweny-four men were tried for "unnatural offences". Twelve were convicted and sentenced - four capitally, though only one (in 1834) was actually hanged. Five drew hard labour in irons on the chain gang, and three were re-transported to Norfolk Island or Moreton Bay..."
"...this inevitably fostered more repressive attitudes towards all homosexuals in Australia. Their sexual preference was doubly damned: first, because it was a crime under law, and second because it was mainly committed by those who were convicts already..."
"...there could have been no better breeding ground for the ferocious bigotry with which Australians of all classes, long after the abadonment of Norfolk Island and of the System itself, perceived the homosexual. And this in turn seemed like an act of cleansing - for homosexuality was one of the mute, stark, subliminal elements in the "convict stain" whose removal, from 1840, so preoccipied Australian
Nationalist..."
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