The Cookpot Riots: how a cooking pot sparked a violent and bloody uprising

Norfolk Island — a brief timeline

~1200 CE: People from Polynesia were the first to inhabit Norfolk Island, arriving around 1200 CE. By the time the British arrived in 1788 the Polynesians had gone.

6 March 1788 – 15 February 1814: First Settlement. The British established Norfolk Island as an auxiliary penal settlement in 1788, expecting to exploit the island’s flax and pine for shipbuilding. These materials proved unsuitable and the settlement was abandoned in 1814.

6 June 1825 – 1853: Second Settlement. The British Government instructed New South Wales Governor Thomas Brisbane to re-establish Norfolk Island as a penal settlement for convicts in the Australian colonies who had reoffended — transported convicts who had committed further offences in the colonies.

1 September 1844 – May 1855: Administration transferred to Van Diemen’s Land. On 1 September 1844 the administration of Norfolk Island was passed to Van Diemen’s Land (later named Tasmania). The penal settlement was finally closed in 1853 and the remaining convicts under sentence were transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

On the morning of 1 July 1846, approximately thirty convicts on Norfolk Island rose in revolt. Within hours, four convict constables were dead and the settlement was in crisis. The subsequent trials resulted in twelve executions: the largest mass execution in the history of the Australian colonies.

The immediate cause was a cooking pot.

Norfolk Island’s Second Settlement, established in 1825, was the most feared destination in the Australian colonial penal system. It was reserved for convicts who had already been transported and had reoffended: men the system had processed through every other instrument of punishment available and found still ungovernable. The Island sits eleven hundred kilometres northeast of Sydney in the Pacific Ocean. There was no escape. The ocean was the wall.

By 1846 the settlement was under the command of Major Joseph Childs, who had been instructed by the British government to impose stricter discipline on a population that had, under his predecessor Alexander Maconochie, experienced four years of relative humanity.

Maconochie had believed that punishment without hope produced men with nothing to lose. He had introduced a system of earned privileges, reduced flogging dramatically, allowed the men to celebrate the Queen’s birthday with games and festivities. He also permitted the convicts to work their own small garden plots so they could grow vegetables to supplement their salt meat and bread diet and prevent scurvy. The colonial administration considered this treatment dangerously soft. Maconochie was removed in 1844 and his reforms dismantled.

Childs restored order through discipline. He withdrew privileges for good behaviour, abolished garden plots, extended working hours, and reduced rations. In June 1846 a visiting inspector submitted a damning report on the deteriorating conditions at the settlement. The British government’s response was to instruct Childs to impose even stricter discipline. In response he prohibited all personal cooking: all provisions were to be prepared only in the general cookhouse. On the evening of 30 June 1846, after the men had been locked into their barracks for the night, Childs ordered that the men’s personal cookpots be removed and locked in the barracks storeroom without their knowledge.

This requires a moment’s explanation. The cookpots were not government issue. They were personal possessions — among the very few things a convict on Norfolk Island could call his own. They also served a vital practical purpose. Norfolk Island was plagued by endemic dysentery, and individual cookpots allowed men to prepare and eat their own portion of food separately, reducing the spread of disease that came with shared cooking arrangements. The personal cookpots stood between the men and illness as much as between them and hunger.

At breakfast the next morning, 1 July 1846, the men discovered their cookpots had been removed on the orders of Commandant Childs. Furious, they forced open the barracks storeroom, retrieved their cookpots, and prepared their meal. But the anger did not subside with the eating. A large group of men rose in revolt, attacking convict overseers, convict constables, and headed for the Magistrate.

It did not take long for the military based on the island to respond and suppress the uprising.

Those killed were convict constables John Morris, John Dinon, and Thomas Saxton, and cookhouse overseer Stephen Smith.

All of the convicts were lined up for muster and inspected one by one for signs of blood and violence. Almost sixty men were isolated as suspects and kept under close guard in a stone-built boat shed, secured to the walls with leg irons.

A Commission of Inquiry held through the afternoon reduced the group committed for trial to twenty-seven. The newly arrived Judge Burgess, who was to hear the case, was struck down with dysentery and returned to Hobart. Further investigations reduced the group to fourteen: four charged with the murder of John Morris and ten with being accessories to that murder.

The replacement judge, Fielding Browne, arrived on the island and on 23 September 1846 commenced the trials of the fourteen men. The jury consisted of five Army officers. All the accused pleaded not guilty. Evidence was heard over two weeks. Each of the accused was permitted to call witnesses in their defense. With everyone already on the island, there was no difficulty in assembling them.

Twelve men were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Two men — John Morton and William Lloyd — were acquitted.

Those found guilty of murder were John Davis, Samuel Kenyon, Dennis Pendergrast, and William Westwood. Those found guilty of being accessories to murder were James Cairnes, Owen Commuskey, Lawrence Kavenagh, Edward McGinnis, William Pearson, William Pickthorne, William Scrimshaw, and Henry Whiting.

On 13 October 1846, twelve men were hanged on Norfolk Island in two groups of six, at the gallows in front of the newly built gaol.

A new commandant was appointed to Norfolk Island: John Price. He became the most feared figure in the settlement’s history, whose methods were so brutal that he was eventually murdered by former prisoners on the Victorian mainland in 1857, two years after Norfolk Island closed.

The cookpot story is not simply a curiosity. It is a precise illustration of how the colonial punishment system worked — and how it failed. Alexander Maconochie had demonstrated that men given hope, given dignity, given something to work toward, responded with better behaviour. The administration dismantled his reforms and replaced them with stricter discipline. The stricter discipline produced a revolt. The revolt produced twelve executions and the appointment of an even more brutal commandant. At no point did anyone in authority ask what the cookpots meant to the men who owned them, or what removing them would cost.

The ruins of the Norfolk Island Second Settlement are still there, accessible by boat from the island’s main wharf. The cookpots are long gone.