Somewhere today around Mount King William I I’m crossing paths with one of Tasmania’s most underrated and hungriest bushwalkers. But to talk about him, we need some context.
A deceptively short 60km east-south-east of here lies the tiny, redundant prison of Sarah Island, nestled in Macquarie Harbour. Today it’s an out-of-the-way tourist destination. I haven’t been, but the pictures look lovely, in a frigid, wind-blasted Lord of the Flies sort of way.
In the 1700s, Britain had a problem; too many damned stinking poor people Dickensing up the joint. They tried making everything more serious than looking covetously in the direction of a powdered wig whilst poor a hanging offence, but eventually got civilisational tennis elbow from operating the gallows trapdoor and eased off. They then found themselves with an embarrassment of prisoners. So over about eighty years from 1787 they transported 162,000 dangerous spoon and lace thieves to Australia and presumably proceeded to dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back for keeping Britain safe from any sort of wealth passing down to the poors.
Hobart was Australia’s second colony (after Tumut), established originally when they realised that Van Diemen’s Land was actually an island and thus not legally covered by James Cook’s I saw it first, bagsies! and that some pesky French were sniffing around. They then figured they could shuffle more convicts down there to take a bit of pressure off the shit job they were doing on Sydney. And since it was even more transportationy, came to be considered an excellent place to send handkerchief thieves, forgers and political dissidents. Also one dandy, for the crime of smiting Queen Victoria on the dome with his iron-tipped cane, likely out of pure reflex. 40% of convicts sent to Australia ended up in Tassie.
Tasmanian convicts enjoyed the fresh air and rigorous exercise of assignment either to work gangs or as indentured labour for free settlers. Though some kept their heads down and did their time, many rudely rejected Her Majesty’s generous hospitality, preferring to leg it into the scrub when they thought nobody was looking. This was the origin of the bushranger, only later taking on its modern meaning as those who succeeded in evading capture realised that armed robbery was a less risky way of surviving than fishing for wombats with your own hand as bait.
Using the same logic that later informed Australia’s approach to deterring asylum seekers, it was decided that an example would be made of those who persisted in their attempts to evade a torturous, punitive enslaving regime for a better life amongst the gum trees, (or had the temerity to keep stealing shit) by shipping them off to a remote prison of Sarah Island. Surely, if transportation hadn’t been enough to crush a man’s spirit, even more transportation would do the trick. No prizes for originality amongst this bunch. The tiny nearby Grummet Island was later used for solitary confinement and determining the limits of comedic recursion.
Thus Macquarie Harbour Penal Station on the remote west coast was born. In the eleven years it ran, it developed infamy as a place of conspicuous and wanton cruelty, and that was by the standards of British colonialism! The “Macquarie Cat” was a cat o’ nine tails with pieces of lead worked into the knots. A brutal affair, floggings were applied liberally for any and all infractions, and administered by fellow convicts who would themselves face flogging if they didn’t put their back into it.* When not having the flesh of their backs pulped, the convicts were pressed into felling and rafting huon pine (while working neck deep in freezing water) and building boats and ships from the wondrous (and now critically endangered) timber. For context, inmates would sometimes kill other inmates so that they would be hanged for the crime rather than remain alive and suffering in that place. In the immortal words of George Carlin; aren’t human beings swell?
Alexander Pearce was sentenced to transportation for the twin crimes of stealing six pairs of shoes and being Irish. Apparently being shipped off to Tassie and forced to perform hard labour was not enough to convince Pearce of the error of his ways, and he continued to disappoint mother Britain by escaping into the wilderness and “embezzling” some turkeys and ducks. Eventually they got sick of his shenanigans and sent him to Sarah Island for forgery and being “illegally at large” (read: free without permission).
He’d only been there for six weeks when he and seven other convicts made a run for it. They’d stolen a skiff, which they intended to use to steal a larger, more seaworthy vessel and sail for England, but abandoned that plan when their escape was noticed and a watch set on the narrow, treacherous passage Hell’s Gates; the only way out of the harbour. So they pivoted their plan and instead plunged into some of the densest scrub anywhere in the world with the plan of walking east until they reached the settled areas.
After a surprisingly short period, somebody killed somebody else and he got eaten. Two of the men got that feeling you get when you’re at a party too late and the mood suddenly changes, and decided it would be better if they left. They made it back to Macquarie Harbour, but died a few days later of exhaustion. The rest of the story depends on which of Pearce’s three contradictory accounts you believe, but the crux is that Pearce walked out of the bush after five weeks and 225km with a blood stained axe and a satisfied burp.
Once captured, the magistrate didn’t believe his story of cannibalism, suspecting it to be a clever ruse to protect his fellow criminals still at large. Pearce was sent back to Sarah Island and proved him wrong by again escaping with a fellow convict. This time they started walking north up the coastline only for Pearce to turn around alone after 11 days with his pockets full of jerky (despite having plenty of other food) and his heart not really in it, and surrender to a search party.
Another pair of convicts, James Goodwin and Thomas Connolly, escaped Sarah Island in March of 1828 with a dugout canoe they’d built over the course of two weeks and a stolen compass. Their exact route is unknown, but after ditching the canoe at an impassable waterfall, they likely followed the Franklin or Denison river then into the vale of Rasselas to the south-east of here. They eventually split up near the settlement of Ouse, after which Connolly was never heard from again and Goodwin was captured and welcomed back into His Majesty’s bosom. Having shown great restraint in not eating his companion (source: Goodwin) he was pardoned, made a surveyor, and is remembered as an explorer.
In 2008, six hikers set out to recreate Pearce’s journey. Australian Hiker interviewed one of the group for their podcast, and it’s also written about in Australian Geographic. It took them 23 days to cover the 170km. On one of those days, they covered 1.1km in a full day of walking. On another, twelve hours of walking netted them 3km of progress. It’s crazy the sorts of things people will do.
Pearce was hanged (by Judge Pedder) for the crimes of not wanting to be a prison slave at the ends of the earth and being a total dick whenever he got hangry, and his skull now resides in the Penn museum in Philadelphia as mute testament to how much more civilised than him we are.
*The last flogging in Australia was administered in 1958 for a botched prison escape involving a gunfight and a stolen ute whose bonnet flipped up before crashing into a hydrant.
