Australian prisoners ‘chose’ death on Norfolk

Press, 28 December 1988, Page 17

Australian prisoners ‘chose’ death on Norfolk

NZPA-AAP Kingston When prisoners draw straws to determine which one of them is to be murdered, and which is to be the murderer, it says something about the barbaric institution from which they are seeking the ultimate solace. This is not a fanciful version of Russian roulette for thrill-seeking inmates.

It happened during one of the blackest periods of Australia’s history. This form of group mercy killing became a practice on Norfolk Island, which for three decades served as a brutal punishment outpost for the most incorrigible felons of colonial Australia.

The tourist on Norfolk today has as much difficulty as official visitors 150 years ago in reconciling how a spot of such natural beauty could have been the scene of such torture, cruelty and misery.

It was during the term of Commandant James Morisset — later to have a lunatic asylum named after him — that the prisoners turned suicide into an act of solidarity. As detailed in Robert Hughes’ book, "The Fatal Shore,” a group of convicts would choose two men by drawing straws: one to die, the other to kill him.

“Others would stand by as witnesses. There being no judge to try capital offences on Norfolk, the

killer and witnesses would have to be sent off to Sydney for trial, affording them some slight chance of escape. “The victim could not choose himself, everyone in the group, apparently, had to be equally ready to die, and the benefits of his death had to be shared equally.” William Ullathorne, the Catholic vicar-general of Australia, visited Norfolk in 1834 and remarked that “so indifferent had even life become that murders were committed in cold blood, the murderer afterwards declaring that he had no illfeeling against his victim, but that his sole object was to obtain his own release.

“Lots were even cast, the man on whom it fell committed the deed, his comrades being witnesses, with the sole view of being taken ... to Sydney.”

On one such occasion a work gang leader, Fitzgerald, was disembowelled with a makeshift knife on a dusty road near Kingston.

Before he died he told his comrades: “Think of me boys, you’ll all get off alone. Tell old Dowling the judge that it’s my own free will, and that Pat Larkins sticks me. I am all ready now. Come on, my hearties ... now quick, please yourself and give me as little pain as you can.” He took two-days to die. Norfolk was first settled

within two months of Captain Arthur Phillip’s landing at Botany Bay in 1788, only to be abandoned 26 years later as a commercial failure.

Its darkest years began in 1825, when it was resettled specifically as a menonly place of secondary punishment. Governor Ralph Darling said: “My object was to hold out that settlement as a place of the extremest punishment, short of death.” Governor Brisbane remarked: “I wish it to be understood that the felon who is sent there is for ever excluded from all hope of return.” “Port Macquarie for first grave offences, Moreton Bay for runaways from the former, and Norfolk Island as the ne plus ultra.”

The Rev. Thomas Sharpe called it an "island of misery” which housed “the most depraved, the most abandoned of the human race — men loaded with crime.”

In order to get to the island hospital convicts were known to rub lime and pounded glass into their cuts and sores to make them worse. Others rubbed the juice of a wild tree into their eyes to cause a temporary blindness.

Many malingerers were flogged, but in 1836 a prisoner named Barrett, weakened by dysentery, was taken for a malingerer and sentenced to

200 lashes. He collapsed and died after the first 50. One of the best accounts of the Morisset regime comes from Laurence Frayne, a Dubliner convicted of theft in 1825, transported to Sydney and later sentenced to death for repeatedly absconding.

Frayne had his sentence commuted to transportation to Norfolk, but had many chances to wish he had not.

Cut to ribbons by the lash, he had to make the journey with maggots crawling in his back and no chance of a wash or a bandage: “My shoulders were actually in a state of decomposition the stench of which I could not bear myself, how offensive then must I appear and smell to my companions in misery ... I really longed for instant death.”

When Morisset sentenced Frayne to 100 lashes for breaking a flagstone in the quarry, Frayne told the commandant he was a tyrant.

“The moment I expressed these words I was sentenced to an additional 100 — to be kept ironed down in a cell for life and never to see daylight again.” The floggings were spaced. Frayne got 50 lashes on his back. In four days the cuts were partly scabbed over and he got 50 more.

The biggest rebellion in the settlement’s history occurred in 1834 when scores of prisoners tried

to overpower their guards and break out.

They failed. For five months the rebels were locked to a chain table naked for four hours each day, according to a contemporary account, with their arms up and fingers extended, and any who betrayed the slightest emotion of pain were either stabbed by the military or flogged on the spot.

One of the soldiers’ amusements was to choose a prisoner at random and get one of the floggers to thrust a stick into the cord that bound his arms, twisting it round and round until blood burst from his fingertips. Ullathorne, the Catholic vicar, came to Norfolk to visit the 30 convicted mutineers, tell them their fate and prepare 14 of them for death. He wrote later: “Those who were to live wept bitterly, whilst those doomed to die, without exception, dropped on their knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God that they were to be delivered from such a place. Who can describe their emotions?”

As transportation came to an end so, mercifully, did Norfolk’s days as a penal establishment.

In 1856 it was cleared of felons to become the new home for descendants of the Bounty mutineers from Pitcairn Island, whose families account for about a third of the island’s present population of 1800.