Image: TAHO PH30-1-631
On 19 August 1830, after 108 days at sea, the convict transport David Lyon dropped anchor in the Derwent. She had left Sheerness in May with 200 male convicts aboard, drawn from the hulks Retribution and others moored at Chatham — men who had spent months, sometimes years, in the floating prisons of the Thames before ever setting foot on a ship bound for Van Diemen’s Land. The ship’s surgeon, Charles Cameron, had pronounced them in a “fair state of health” and fit for the voyage. Beyond that, the David Lyon‘s men were, on arrival, indistinguishable from any other shipload of felons landing at Hobart that year.
Except that nine of them were not going to stay that way for long.
On 6 September 1830, less than three weeks after the David Lyon dropped anchor, the Colonial Times published Government Notice No. 173. Colonial Secretary John Burnett announced, on authority of Governor Arthur, a list of new appointments to the police of the territory. Nine names from the David Lyon: John Day, Christopher Holden, Stephen Roach, John Scholfield, Thomas Watson, William Lewis Watkins, H. Wormleighton, Dennis Andrews and Thomas Baxton, were sworn in as constables, effective the same day. A handful of other newly arrived men joined the Field Police alongside them.[1]
Nine men, not yet a month in the colony, still presumably shaking off the stiffness of three and a half months at sea, were handed the King’s authority to arrest, restrain and give evidence against their fellow colonists. Welcome to Van Diemen’s Land: here is your truncheon, your handcuffs, your sixpence a day.
Image: Hobart History 2026
A long-standing — and unloved — solution
The David Lyon‘s men were not an aberration. Appointing convicts as constables almost as soon as they disembarked was, by 1830, a well-worn practice in Governor Arthur’s Van Diemen’s Land (1824-1836), and one that had already earned the police force a durable and unaffectionate nickname: the Felon Police. Contemporaries were not shy about their contempt. The force was dismissed in the press as the low constabulary of this island, the worthless constabulary, a set of abominable rascals set loose to catch other rascals. One critic summed up the whole arrangement as little more than setting thieves to look after thieves.[2]
Even the men running the system had few illusions about it. Josiah Spode[3], Superintendent of Convicts, admitted outright that the recruitment system was anything but a good one. When Governor George Arthur was questioned by the British parliament’s Molesworth Committee on Transportation in 1837, he did not pretend the practice was ideal: he defended it as the least bad option available to him. Free settlers, he explained, simply wouldn’t do the job for what the colony could afford to pay. When he had tried recruiting Chelsea out-pensioners[4] and free emigrants instead of convicts, the experiment had backfired badly: the pensioners, he told the committee, were almost invariably addicted to drunkenness, and the free emigrants were, in his memorable phrase, not particularly well selected, a low class of persons, very.[5]
So, convicts it was. And not just any convicts: men fresh off the boat, before the colony had any real chance to observe their conduct or character.
The logic of convict against convict
Arthur’s evidence to Molesworth reveals a specific, deliberate strategy behind the instant constable. A number of men, he said, were selected for the police out of every ship – men who knew their shipmates and had come out to the colony with them. This was not carelessness. It was calculation. Arthur wanted men who could recognise, inform on, and if necessary, betray, the very people they had spent months chained alongside on the voyage out.[6]
In a dispatch to Lord Bathurst, Arthur was candid about what he was doing: he was deliberately setting convict against convict, using the shared knowledge and intimacy of the transport ship as an instrument of surveillance and control. Complaints that arming convicts fresh off the hulks was reckless, he insisted, had proved totally groundless. The policy, he claimed, worked precisely because it created distrust and disunion among the prisoner population. Suspicion, not solidarity, was the point.
It’s a chilling piece of social engineering when you think about it. The very men who might, in other circumstances, have relied on one another for survival – sharing rations, covering for escapes, keeping secrets from authority – were instead offered a shortcut out of the ordinary convict experience, on the condition that they turn their intimate knowledge of their shipmates into a weapon.
The price of the badge — and the cost of corruption
Image: Hobart History, 2026
What did an instant constable actually get for his trouble? Not much, at first. Members of the Field Police were paid a mere sixpence a day, with rations of meat and bread thrown in – a wage explicitly designed, at least in theory, to prevent them from being exposed to temptation from want.[7] The real prize on offer wasn’t the pay. It was the prospect of an early conditional pardon, particularly for men who distinguished themselves capturing bushrangers.
But low pay and high incentive proved, unsurprisingly, a recipe for corruption rather than a cure for it. Constables were entitled to a share of any fine imposed following an arrest they’d made. This meant a constable had a direct financial stake in charging people, whether the magistrate found the person guilty or not. One case saw a constable holding a ticket-of-leave charge a fellow convict with drunkenness and happily pocket half the resulting fine. Public complaints piled up describing constables who apprehended many poor persons found in the streets after 8 o’clock, free as well as bond, purely to extort money from them – while, it was claimed, the most notorious thieves and vagabonds walked past unmolested, having greased the right palm with what one furious correspondent called the salving nature of a silver emollient.[8]
By November 1835, organised political opposition had formed around exactly this grievance. The newly established Political Association sent Arthur a letter of protest, condemning what it called the demoralising, degrading, and dangerous practice of arming felons with the office of constable and letting them range the colony not only with arms, but without control – men drawn, in some cases, straight from penal settlements and chain gangs where they’d been sent for bad conduct in the first place.[9]
Rules on paper
Appendix 17 Report from the Select Committee on Transportation; British Parliamentary Papers, 1837
Faced with mounting public disquiet, the government issued Standing Instructions for the Constabulary in 1836, which every officer was required to carry.[10] The instructions asked constables to behave with civility to everyone, and in a line that reads almost as an admission of the problem it was trying to solve, reminded them that when questioning a suspected person, they should always bear in mind they might be speaking to an innocent one.[11]
For constables specifically stationed in Hobart and Launceston, an additional layer of rules applied: each man was to be inspected before and after every shift to confirm he was perfectly sober, as well as cleanly and decent.[12] That such a requirement needed spelling out tells its own quiet story about the state of the force by the mid-1830s.
Appendix 17 Report from the Select Committee on Transportation; British Parliamentary Papers, 1837
An unresolved irony
Terry Newman, whose 2022 piece in the Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings first drew my attention to the David Lyon‘s nine, ends on a nicely pointed question. Shortly before Governor Franklin’s arrival in 1837, Arthur had cut off the ration allowance previously granted to the families of married constables: a saving for the colonial purse, no doubt, but one that placed extra financial strain on men whose low wages were already supposed to be the safeguard against corruption in the first place.
Did Arthur, in tightening the budget, quietly recreate the very temptation from want his sixpence-a-day wage had been designed to prevent – even for the supposedly well-conducted convicts the system was meant to reward?
It was, in the end, exactly what Arthur intended: a colony where the men enforcing the King’s peace and the men who’d broken it were often, for the first fortnight or so, the same men.
[1] Colonial Times, 10 September 1830
[2] True Colonist Van Diemen’s Land Political Despatch, and Agricultural and Commercial, 13 January 1835
[3] https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spode-josiah-2686
[4] Retired or invalided British Army veterans who, rather than residing at the Royal Hospital Chelsea itself (as “in-pensioners”), received their pension while living independently in the community — including, for some, after emigrating to the colonies.
[5] Stefan Petrow, “Policing in a Penal Colony: Governor Arthur’s Police System in Van Diemen’s Land, 1826–1836,” Law and History Review 18, no. 2 (2000)
[6] Report from the Select Committee on Transportation (1837), Minutes of Evidence, Arthur’s testimony
[7] Terry Newman, “Instant convict constables: a ‘set of abominable rascals’,” THRA Papers and Proceedings 69, no. 1 (2022)
[8] Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, 20 October 1826,
[9] Terry Newman, “Instant convict constables: a ‘set of abominable rascals’,” THRA Papers and Proceedings 69, no. 1 (2022):
[10] AOT POL 318/4, memo by Forster, 9 June 1836
[11] https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4174348
[12] AOT POL 318/4