The impossible contract

The Impossible Contract

A young man arrives in Van Diemen’s Land. Within weeks he is sent to a distant paddock to watch a flock of sheep. He has no dog, no weapon, and no experience with livestock — he is a casual labourer from East Stonehouse, Plymouth, a busy maritime port in Devon, when he was arrested for housebreaking, found guilty and sentenced to seven years transportation. He spends four months on the ship, arrives in Hobart in late November and is still getting his bearings in a strange country. Shortly after his arrival, he is sent out on assignment and is handed his instructions: don’t lose any sheep. Then he is left alone.

This is the story of John Long, assigned as a shepherd in Van Diemen’s Land interior in early 1831. It is also the story of hundreds of convict workers across the colony who were placed in an arrangement that looked, on its surface, like employment — but was something quite different.

A Job Without the Means to Do It

The assignment system that governed convict labour in Van Diemen’s Land gave settlers access to workers at almost no cost. In return, masters were expected to provide food, clothing, shelter, and some basic supervision. Convicts were expected to work, to follow orders, and – critically – to be responsible for whatever was in their care.

For a shepherd, that meant the sheep.

The problem was that a shepherd in the Van Diemen’s Land interior faced threats he could not control and had no means to counter. Other people crept in at night and took a sheep. Aboriginal people, whose land this had recently been, helped themselves to stock they had no reason to regard as anyone else’s property. Native predators like wedge-tailed eagles and feral dogs took their share. A shepherd alone in a paddock with just a rough hut, no gun and no dog could not prevent any of this.

When the master returned a week later and counted the flock, the missing sheep had to be accounted for. The accounting almost always went the same way. The shepherd was responsible for the sheep. The sheep were gone. Therefore, the shepherd had failed.

John Long was found short by twenty sheep. He was charged with neglect of duty and sentenced to nine months prison with hard labour.

The Rigged Ledger

What makes this more than simple cruelty is the structure underneath it. The assignment system created an arrangement in which the master bore no risk at all.

If the sheep were tended well and the flock thrived, the master profited. If sheep went missing, to thieves, to predators, to bad weather, the convict was punished. There was no mechanism for a convict to say this was not my fault, no investigation into what had actually happened, no consideration of whether the shepherd had been given the tools or authority to prevent the loss. The punishment followed the outcome, not the fault.

This was not an accidental feature of the system. It was enormously convenient. Losses that would otherwise represent a business risk to the master became, instead, occasions to punish the workforce. The convict absorbed the cost of every mishap, whether or not he had caused it.

We might call this accountability without authority: the convict was held fully responsible for outcomes he had no power to prevent. Or, more plainly: an impossible contract. The terms required him to achieve what he was not equipped to achieve, and the penalty for failure was certain.

The Hostage Arrangement

For convicts who had formed families, the situation was grimmer still.

Under the assignment system, a married convict with children had something to lose beyond his own skin. Some masters recognised this and used it deliberately: if you behave, your family stays together. If you do not, your wife is reassigned, your children go to the orphan school, even though both their parents are alive and present.

The resources a convict in this position received: a cottage, steady work, relative stability, were not provided in any spirit of fairness or reciprocity. They were leverage. The family itself became the enforcement mechanism, more effective than flogging because a man might endure his own suffering but could not endure watching his children taken away for reasons beyond his control.

This was not an informal understanding. Masters had the legal authority to break up convict families, and magistrates would support them in exercising it as a matter of colonial discipline.

What the System Made of John Long

John Long served his time in the prison and public works gang. When he came out, his situation was unchanged: still a convict, still in a colony where his labour could be directed and his failures punished, still with no path to anything better.

He absconded. By October 1833 he had been sentenced to a further six months at the Bridgewater chain gang for absconding from his road party. Somewhere in all of this he had found others in the same position, and together they went further. Long, along with three other men: George Robinson, William Aspinall, and John Hagin, broke into the house of John Langford and robbed it. They were also strongly suspected of robbing the Launceston mail, though they were tried for the burglary rather than the mail robbery.

All four were convicted at the Hobart Supreme Court in December 1833. Judge Montagu was unsparing. He told them the government had come to a determination to enforce the strict letter of the law, and that he could not hold out to them the most remote prospect of reprieve.

John Long and George Robinson were executed on 24 December 1833:  Christmas Eve. Hagin and Aspinall were given a last minute reprieve and were was transported to Norfolk Island for life.

John Long had not arrived in the colony as a violent criminal. He had arrived as a young man transported for a first offence, and something minor enough that it earned him assignment straight away, rather than the more punitive end of the convict system. The labourer who was told he was now a shepherd, who lost twenty sheep he could not have saved, who was punished for others’ thefts, who emerged from the chain gang to find himself still trapped: that man then made choices that ended his life on the gallows at twenty-three.

But the choices were made in a system that had already decided what he was worth, and what he owed, and what would happen when he could not pay.

John Long was executed in Van Diemen’s Land on 24 December 1833, convicted of burglary and robbery in a dwelling house. He is one of 523 confirmed executions documented in Speaker for the Dead, a forthcoming history of capital punishment in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania, 1806–1946.