As
the massive gate clangs behind me, and I follow in silence the shuffling
men in front, I groan inwardly at the thought of my bad luck. I need
not have been here. As a convict living in the Hyde Park Barracks, I
had at least known who my companions were. Only too well, you might
say, for the building held 1000 convicts, and the only space we got
for sleeping was 7 feet by 2 feet for our hammock. The coughing and
hacking through the night interrupted any sleep. If a man had had fifty
or a hundred lashes at the triangle he found it very hard to lie on
his back, or even turn over as you could do in a bed.
But here I am up inside the Woolloomooloo Stockade. The irony of it
is that I was one of the iron-gang who built the 16ft high sandstone
wall. Our gang either worked in the quarry down the road, where Palmer
Street meets William Street, or if we had progressed as stone masons,
we were the ones who laid stone upon stone with the mortar of clay and
crushed shells. My word, those sandstone blocks were heavy. After shaping
each stone we put our individual monicker on it for the tally. My number
was 17. We had to get inside the shafts of the open dray to pull them
up the hill. After sweating so much we used to feel faint. There was
never enough water, for it had to be carried up from Rushcutters Creek.
Every jolly thing we needed had to be carried up a steep incline. They
say gaols are always on a hill so that the executions by hanging can
be visible. There was already a very tall windmill in Darley Place.
It was because I had served my sentence and was free at last that I
am actually in here. My habit was to go down to the western edge of
Sydney Cove when any sailing ship came in. I could see the tall masts
from where I was dossing. I might earn a few coins for helping unload.
This particular day it happened to be cases of spirit. In the bustle
of the crowd I thought no one would notice if I slipped a case to one
side. Jove! It was heavy. I could only get as far as a lane off Soldier's
Row. But everybody in Sydney town knows if you've been a lag. It's the
way you hold your head down. So, of course I was caught. And to think
I was going to be put inside the very walls I had helped build back
in the 1830s.
But at first I was dumped inside the Sydney Gaol down at The Rocks at
the corner of Essex Street. The 10 foot wide central corridor had two
rooms for the prisoners, 32 feet by 22 feet. Both of the prison rooms
contained 112 male prisoners. I don't know how many were in the female
room, but I could hear children crying. What a congestion for the men!
It is a fact that any contagious disease was quickly passed on. The
walls of the room were so dirty, marked with all the painful messages
of doomed men. It is no wonder that the gaol was condemned for being
'insecure, dilapidated and too small'.
One thing about this new Gaol is how clean everything is. The yard is
paved with sandstone, still glistening. Some of my mates from the Hyde
Park Barracks were shipped out to Cockatoo Island to work on sandstone
slabs for the township.
I used
to hear the New Colonial Architect, Mortimer Lewis, tell his Foreman
of Works about the gaol he was building. It was to be of masonry, the
cells to be groined and have stone floors, iron framed windows and doors.
He had asked for an ironed gang to perform the laborious part of the
work such as quarrying, loading carts, carrying the stone and assisting
the masons in preparing it. A gang of 100 men would require only twenty
masons.
The two-storey cell blocks radiating from the central chapel actually
form segments for exercise yards between the blocks. The Governor of
the Gaol has fine quarters in from the entrance gate. Water by this
time has to be carried by the inmates from Busby's Bore standpump outside
the Victoria Barracks.
I am escorted to wing four and cell No. 7. A room to myself at last!
How clean the walls are, but how deadly quiet. No ships now to look
out for. Only the distant clop of horses' hooves tell me I am still
alive. For the midday meal we queue up in low buildings near the perimeter
of the southern wall. That was the wall I helped to build. If I were
only outside I would show you my number 17 carved into the honey-coloured
sandstone block. The bread is a bit weevily. My mates on Cockatoo Island
told me about the wheat from India which the colony had to buy because
of the drought. It was alive with weevils. So, what has to be done?
Into the massive bottle-shaped storage they had had to carve out of
the sandstone, they had been told to pour in the wheat. When the mouth
of it was blocked the weevils would all die. Yeah! But that didn't mean
that they sifted them out before cooking.
We are ordered out into the yard between two wings for daily exercise.
But we who were convicts, don't really need enforced movement. We had
so much of it in the chain-gangs. Of course, the prisoners are 'colonial
convicts', ones who came out free but offended in the settlement. We
'government men' were known as Imperial convicts. And here was I, a
bit of both, Mmm. But at least I had served my time for the first
lot.
One thing that does make me glad to be on this side of the gaol gate
was the stares of the people in the streets as we walked all the way
from George Street North up to the hill on Darlinghurst. Yes, it had
a new name now, after that Governor Darling who was so disliked. And
what did they see as they gawked at us men? We wore greyish woollen
Parramatta frocks and trousers, or grey or ochre jackets with duck overalls,
all daubed over with broad arrows. The different styles of dress denoted
our year of arrival. Yes, our clothes used to be made at the Female
Factory at Parramatta. Our jangling leg-chains held up by a single chain
caused the children to hide behind their mothers' skirts.
Since it was the month of June 1841 when we were escorted up from the
Rocks to this gaol, it was quite cold, especially when surrounded by
so much stone.
There was nothing homely, like a plank or a brick. Stone-stone-stone.
I believe the cell walls were two feet thick. You might as well be in
a tomb. And the staircase is iron. When I walk in the yard I catch a
glimpse of the weathervane on top of the round stone chapel building.
It is a fine silhouette of a rooster! Is that because a rooster crowed
when Peter denied he knew his friend and leader? Or is it because we
are in the east of Sydney Town?
Accompanying us from the Sydney Gaol at The Rocks was the Principal
Gaoler, Henry Keck. I hear that a new Commissioner of Police, W. A.
Miles, has arrived from England on 14 August. A strange bit of news
is that the High Sheriff McQuoid, in a fit of temporary insanity, has
shot himself at his residence in Darlinghurst. But what we didn't need
to hear, but all of us were forced to see, were the first executions
at the new Gaol, carried out on 20 October, at the entrance gates, in
full view of the rest of the township. And that alone did certainly
spoil the rest of the day for me!