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In September 1837, Captain Alexander Maconochie, a naval officer, geographer, and private secretary to Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin, sat down in Hobart and wrote the most damaging assessment of the Van Diemen’s Land convict system that any official had yet produced. The result, Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c., was presented to both Houses of Parliament in London the following year, reprinted in Hobart by William Gore Elliston, and then largely disappeared from easy view. The copy behind this article came from a digitised scan held by Trove, the National Library of Australia’s archive.[1]
The report argues that the convict system’s worst problems were also its most invisible ones.
How the report came to be written
Maconochie hadn’t set out to become a critic of the transportation system. Before he left England with Franklin in 1836, the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline[2] had asked him to look into how the convict system actually operated in the penal colonies, with a view to corresponding with them about it. When Maconochie referred this request to the Colonial Office, Sir George Grey directed him to treat the subject as one on which information was welcome, but to provide his report only to His Majesty’s Government, not with the Society directly. The report that resulted was authorised, expected, and addressed to the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, by name.
Maconochie was careful to establish his own credibility as a witness. He noted that his position as Franklin’s private secretary had let him see more of the colony’s workings, across every level of society, than almost anyone else could have in the same span of time, and that he had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land with no strong opinions on transportation at all. If anything, he wrote, “my bias was certainly in favour of its existing institutions.”[3] His conclusions weren’t the product of reforming zeal looking for a cause. They were what he said the evidence had forced on him.
Image: Wikipedia
The case against the assignment system
The heart of the report is a numbered indictment of the assignment system: the practice of handing newly arrived convicts over to private settlers as unpaid, effectively coerced labour, for years at a stretch, with a ticket-of-leave as the only prospect of relief.
Maconochie’s central complaint wasn’t that the system was harsh. It was that it was arbitrary. Only offences were officially recorded, never good conduct and “a careless fellow, however good his disposition and intentions, especially if he has had an indifferent master, may have a long list against him, while a thorough villain, more happily circumstanced… may have few or none.”[4] A man’s fate under assignment depended almost entirely on which master he happened to be handed to, and not on anything he had done, good or bad.
He pressed the comparison to slavery directly: convicts as slaves, masters as slaveholders. Masters had no lasting property interest in preserving a convict the way a slaveholder had in a slave, which tended to produce a master “of the worst character”[5] for it. And he insisted the fault lay in the structure of the system, not in the men running it: “these inconveniences are but in a very small degree dependant on the administration of the system… the cause lies much deeper than the mere personal character of successive Governors.”[6] Colony after colony, Governor after Governor, the same complaints recurred, which told him the problem wasn’t who was in charge, but what they had been asked to run.
He backed the argument with numbers that would have been hard to explain away. In 1836, one in every 105 people in Van Diemen’s Land had been convicted before the Supreme Court or Quarter Sessions, against roughly one in a thousand in England, and one in thirteen hundred in Scotland. Drunkenness convictions among the free population alone ran at 14%, against under 2% in London. A footnote citing the colony’s Director-General of Roads found that convict labour, as currently organised, returned only fifteen pence of value for every three shillings it ought to have produced. This was a loss, in that department alone, of £30,000 a year.
The remedy: separate punishment from reform
Maconochie’s proposed fix, later developed into the mark system he would go on to trial at Norfolk Island, rests on a single structural move: stop trying to punish and reform a man through the same process, at the same time, in the hands of the same private master.
Under his plan, punishment would come first. This would be hard labour at dedicated stations, away from the free population, with religious, mechanical, and agricultural instruction attached. Only afterward would training begin, and it would look nothing like assignment. Convicts would be grouped into small, self-selected parties of around six men, who would earn or forfeit marks each evening according to their conduct. They were never to be punished summarily,[7] only by the gain or loss of marks, with the whole party’s fate bound together. A man who let his group down would drag the others back with him. Maconochie was explicit that this was the engine of the system: that peer accountability, not physical coercion, would do the moral work that assignment couldn’t.
A ticket-of-leave, once earned this way, should come with far fewer restrictions than the colony currently imposed. It would see an end to the frequent musters and curfews that made even nominal freedom a form of continued policing.
The endorsements
The report’s appendix includes three testimonials, and they’re worth reading almost as closely as the report itself.
Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, agreed with Maconochie’s account of the existing system’s failures, though he stopped short of endorsing the replacement. He noted, tellingly, that it was already unclear whether the Home Government intended to keep transportation going at all.
James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, the Quaker missionaries who had spent five years touring the Australian penal colonies, wrote in strong support across three separate letters. They also offered something Maconochie’s own report lacked: a working precedent. At Macquarie Harbour, they noted, reformed prisoners had once been allowed to associate voluntarily in a separate room from the rest of the convict population. This looked like a rough, partial version of Maconochie’s grouped-probation idea “and, though it fell far short of that now proposed, yet it worked well.”[8]
The sharpest letter, though, comes from Alfred Stephen, VDL’s former Attorney-General. He called reformation under the existing system “hopeless,” and illustrated why, with a contrast that does more work than any statistic: a first-time convict, “dull, though willing,” lands a hard master and is broken by the experience, while “another fellow, scarred all over with crime, perhaps an educated burglar… becomes a house servant in some town establishment… wears a livery, sleeps on a bed of down, and lives in luxury.” Stephen’s question still lands: “Is this lottery, where the prizes are generally to the worst, fit for the established system of punishment of a great nation?” [9] He backed it with gaol returns from Launceston and Hobart showing that of seventy men committed for trial that month, forty-six were emancipated convicts already reoffending, not first-time free settlers turning to crime.
Reading the report today
None of this changed the system quickly, or in the way Maconochie hoped. But the report did real work: it was used by the Molesworth Committee’s 1838 inquiry into transportation. Maconochie’s report raised a storm in Hobart, particularly with two powerful officials: Colonial Secretary John Montagu and Chief Police Magistrate Matthew Forster, who saw Maconochie as the enemy for being critical of the system they administered. This conflict cost Maconochie his position within the colony. He would get his chance to test the ideas anyway, on Norfolk Island, a few years later.
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A full copy of the report, digitised from the Trove holding, is available along with the original scan for anyone who wants to check a quotation against the source.
Primary source: Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c. By Captain Maconochie (London: printed by W. Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; reprinted Hobart Town: William Gore Elliston, 1838). Digitised copy: Trove, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-366494214.
[1] https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/74VvE5lZ0zdM
[2] Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders. It was founded in London by a group of Quakers connected to Elizabeth Fry, joined by Evangelical Anglicans. Samuel Hoare (Quaker banker, Fry’s brother-in-law) chaired it, and Thomas Fowell Buxton was among the committee’s leading reformers. It functioned as a lobbying body pressuring the government on prison reform, focused on classifying prisoners (separating convicted from untried, serious from minor offenders) and providing prison labour to prevent idleness, though notably it supported both Bentham’s Panopticon design and the treadwheel as hard labour. It helped drive the Gaols Act of 1823, and by 1824 fifty-four prisons had adopted its recommended disciplinary system. It also had international reach: founding member Walter Venning set up a sister society in St. Petersburg in 1819.
[3] Alexander Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c. (London: W. Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; reprinted Hobart Town: William Gore Elliston, 1838), letter to Lord John Russell, 30 September 1837, p. 3. Digitised copy: Trove, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-366494214.
[4] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 5.
[5] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 6.
[6] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 7.
[7] Summary punishment means punishment imposed by a person in authority, typically a magistrate. This would occur quickly and directly following the infraction, without the formal process of a trial: no indictment, no jury, no right of appeal. It’s the opposite of punishment following conviction at a full court (assizes, quarter sessions, or the Supreme Court), where the accused has the protections of a proper hearing. In the convict-system this is the distinction that mattered. Serious crimes, capital offences and felonies, went to the Supreme Court by indictment, with a jury and from 1837 the right to defence counsel. But breaches of convict discipline such as insolence, drunkenness, absconding, refusing to work or disobedience, were dealt with summarily: a single magistrate, often acting on nothing more than the master’s or overseer’s complaint. The magistrate could order a flogging, extra labour, or solitary confinement on the spot. No jury, just minimal process, and the magistrate was frequently a settler himself with every incentive to side with the master.
[8] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 13.
[9] Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline, p. 14.
