dispute before being given a pardon after serving fourteen years but was now a free man and ready to print his latest edition. He called an end to ‘finishing day’ and ordered the pumping of the iron press.
His printers and editors probably ended their finishing day’s work by ambling to the Pickwick or their latest tavern of choice absorb and dissect the freshly printed pages, the paper still slightly damp but warm, the ink still willing to leave an imprint. Amid the tightly compressed lines of small type, eyes quickly went to the Domestic Intelligence column on Page 3. Many sensed these were the first words of what would be an immediate sensation in the colony, and perhaps well beyond when the newspaper found its usual way across the seas to London to the Colonial Office and the Jerusalem Coffee House subscription room and possibly London’s Garrick Club, where Dickens sojourned with other ‘gentlemen of refinement and education’.
What a printer’s devil had typeset as RUHTRA TROP TA REDRUM now revealed its true face: MURDER AT PORT ARTHUR. Then: ‘Two youths have been conveyed from Port Arthur to this city, charged with the murder of a free overseer by striking him on the head with a stone hammer.’
Close by was a brief summary of the matters listed for Supreme Court trial that day before his Honour the Chief Justice, eleven cases in total ‘including those of two lads for murder at Port Arthur’.5
A ‘Murder at Port Arthur’ headline was nothing remarkable in a colony born of criminality, where reports of violence and manhunts for convict ‘bolters’ or bushrangers and hangings ‘at the usual hour’ were part of the everyday, and Port Arthur was frequently painted as a ‘Gomorrah — Earthly Hell’6 of incorrigibles whose repeat crimes meant they had to be isolated even in a land of exile. But a murder involving two lads was not part of the everyday. Young convicts were known to be insolent, profane, thieving and dishonest, but none had been seen as boys capable of murder. Until now.
Those former convicts familiar with settlements of punishment would have quickly sensed the Colonial Times’ headline was probably not entirely correct: if two lads were involved, then the murder would not have been at Port Arthur, but another place even more isolated, even more extraordinary: Point Puer. A place where some 3000 young boys, real life Oliver Twists, Charles Bates and Jack Dawkins, were exiled between 1834 and 1849 in the British Empire’s most desperate and boldest social experiment: to rid the Old World of its unwanted poor and criminal children, be they more victim or villain, by transporting them to the New World.
The proclaimed intent was to suppress what was becoming known as juvenile delinquency, to ‘save’ boys as young as nine or ten from a lifetime of poverty-induced criminality by transporting them in prison ships to exile on the other side of the world to serve out long sentences under armed guard in the world’s first prison created exclusively for boys.
Many convicts first heard it as Point ‘Pure’, until someone explained Puer was a Latin word for ‘boy’. But others knew it as also a term used for the dog faeces collected from the streets and hand-rubbed into hides at the leather tanneries in Bermondsey, or a French word for stink or a Roman term for sex slave. Those who survived Point Puer might have come to their own definition of a place which was portrayed as a chance for a boy to escape an old life, and some did, but others could not see the chance or did not want to take it.
Whatever the true meaning of its name, the story of the juvenile Port Arthur was the stuff of a Dickens novel, a Boys Town created by prejudice and justice at the heart of a rich and mighty Empire, its most remote outpost housing a generation of boys stolen away from whatever passed for their childhood and families. Here they were expediently despatched out of mind and sight to the last inhabited landform before Antarctica where, off-limits to anyone but a few approved visitors, the chain of Her Majesty’s justice would employ severe discipline and punishment to perhaps ‘save’ some and set them on the ‘right path’.
The author would have been drawn to the conflict of colonial administrators and their supporters lauding Point Puer as one of humanity’s ‘most successful and gratifying’ experiments, while others boldly denounced it as a cruel and failed expediency. What might he make of this murder story within a bigger convict story which was part of a bigger British society story? Would he see Point Puer boys as cold-hearted killers or as sad victims of a cold-hearted world? How would he judge the world’s greatest empire delivering unwanted children to exile on the other side of the world? Where was the true wickedness? Might he paint a picture that, like pieces of printing type, the true face of ‘mere men’ or ‘mere boys’ were only ever revealed when they were compressed together?
The judgment of Dickens would never be written, but in the taverns of Hobart Town and the salons of the colony’s administrators an unanticipated truth had revealed itself: despite the averred salvation hopes of government and colonial officers in Whitehall and Van Diemen’s Land, Her Majesty’s Boys Prison at Point Puer had seen the head of an overseer smashed in.
Perhaps this first boys’ murder and pending trial was the final chapter of a story that even Dickens himself could not have imagined in the lottery of life’s circumstances and choices. But in the days to come, the editors and printers of the Colonial Times and other papers in the colony would tell the story of what happened on a murderous day at Point Puer, and whether two boys would soon be hanging by the neck until dead. For now, as an icy air began to drape the Hobart Town darkness, its residents had the same simple question on their minds: How could the lives of two little boys come to this?
2
A LAW UNTO THEMSELVES
There are many pleasant fictions of the law…but there is not one so…practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye.
— Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Experience, newspapers, Boz sketches, and reading of Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, Mr Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge helped many in Van Diemen’s Land piece together some understanding of the causes and circumstances of their lives.
New industrial machines of the 19th century had unleashed power and profit for the cradle of the British Empire, but impoverishment and pain for many. With thousands of poor rural families trying to escape unemployment and poverty by fleeing to larger towns and cities without any promise of work or shelter, and the exodus coming at the same time as the demobbing of the army and navy at the end of the Napoleonic wars, Britain’s population almost doubled from about eight million to fifteen million by 1841.
What was harder to understand was that many unemployed, poor and hungry families felt they had no choice but to set their children — nearly forty percent of England’s population in the 1830s were aged fourteen and under — on a path of dangerous uncertainty. Thousands, especially boys, were forced to thieve to help sustain a family, or simply abandoned onto the street by impoverished, imprisoned, abusive or drunkard fathers, stepfathers or mothers. Others were orphaned.
The result was a rising tide, estimated at twenty-five percent a year,1 of youngsters forced to survive by cunning and crime. The outbreak of pickpocketing, theft and house break-ins fuelled a moral panic among middle and ruling classes worried about their personal well-being and property being at risk from immoral and dangerous ‘felons’ and ‘undesirables’. Although when some of the same offences were committed by their own children, they were dismissed as mere ‘pranks’ or ‘frolics’, as a Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions acknowledged:
Sons of persons of the highest rank in this country…often commit offences out of the exuberance of spirits and activity, which the law, if it visited them at all, must visit by sentences of great severity…(offences) passed over as frolics in the sons of the rich are treated in the children of the poor as crimes of magnitude.2
But
