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Little is known of Tasmania beyond its repute as a convict settlement; but five years have now elapsed since it ceased to be one; and as the traces of its former state are fast disappearing, it is to be hoped that the recollection of it will also vanish. The free- born sons of Britain have flocked to its shores, carrying with them the noble

characteristics of the mother country, and by their unceasing perseverance and industry adding to the lustre of their race.1

Henry Butler Stoney wrote a travel narrative intended to provide information to those at ‘Home’ in Britain that would lessen the reputation of Tasmania as a wild and dangerous place populated by convicts and bushrangers.2 From the first pages, in his preface, Stoney directed the readers’ gaze from convictism. He traversed the colony in the mid 1850s writing of the people, land and community as he went. The tone of this work is a celebration of the replication of fine English ways – houses, gardens, trees, great men, and the style of life. Stoney was very taken with the Midlands. His travels took him to Oatlands and on to the village of Ross, which he lauded for its stone buildings. Thence to Campbell Town, of which he said: ‘The neighbouring gentry, men of considerable property and substance, are far in advance, and take the lead in all the agricultural projects of the colony.’3

Stoney saw the outcome of three decades of development in the Midlands. It was gratifyingly reminiscent of Britain, as another described it not many years later: ‘the names of the halting places keep up your remembrance of the old country... names which naturally send fancy roaming over the Highlands and down through the shires to the coast of the

1 _{Henry Butler Stoney, A Residence in Tasmania: With a Descriptive Tour Trough the Island, from Macquarie}

Harbour to Circular Head, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1856, pp. v-vi. 2

Bushranging continued an issue into the 1850s. John Quigley was shot at when he attempted to abscond after robbing parties of visitors to the Campbell Town races on 11 October 1855. See KR von Stieglitz, A Short History of Campbell Town and the Midland Pioneers, Second Edition, Evandale, TAS: KR von Stieglitz, 1965, p. 16.

3 _{Stoney, A Residence in Tasmania: With a Descriptive Tour Trough the Island, from Macquarie Harbour to}

Circular Head p. 200. Stoney visited Rosedale and wrote to thank Leake for a sketch of the house. Henry Butler Stoney to John Leake, 10 August 1855, Leake Papers, Hobart: University of Tasmania Library Special and Rare Materials Collection, L1/B523.

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English Channel.’4 Estate names bestowed in the 1820s and 1830s reflected the origins of those who built them. Along the main roads, nameplates on gates leading to long tree-lined carriage ways reminded the traveller of Britain: Rosedale, Mona Vale, Woodbury, Clarendon, Egleston, Rookby, Meadow Bank, Clyne Vale, and many more.

The way land was granted prior to 1830 contributed to the colony’s class system. A three-tiered system developed in Tasmania of landlord, tenant farmer and itinerant farm labourer. In the Midlands it was more defined: a pastoral economy replicated the British system of landowner and serf.5 This latter system, classified as ‘the geography of Van Diemen’s Land’,6 or Old Tasmania, demonstrated the successful establishment of what Reynolds described as a ‘colonial gentry’.7 Primarily the gentry was formed by the emigrant families who received land grants in Tasmania prior to 1831. These families ‘continued to play an important role in the economic and political life of the colony until the concluding years of the century.’8 They held onto their land and the social and political power it

represented.9 Dillon does not concede or suggest colonial gentry: for her these early arriving families were all middle class. Men in these families became ‘district notables’.10 A majority of these families shared two background features: modest capital and respectability. Status for women was ascribed from the company they kept.11 However named, John Leake and his family were firmly in the privileged category.12

The physical limits of arable land in Tasmania had influenced the development of agriculture and grazing and these limits were reached at a time when other colonies continued to expand.13 Pastoralists who had land granted or purchased early were in the strongest

4 _{As reported by William Senior of his journey along the Midland Road. Hilary Webster, ed., “Launceston to}

Hobart,” in The Tasmanian Traveller: a Nineteenth Century Companion for Modern Travellers, Canberra: Brolga Press, 1988, p. 14-15.

5 _{Shayne Breen, “Class,” in The Companion to Tasmanian History, Alison Alexander, ed., Hobart: Centre for}

Tasmanian Historical Studies, 2005, pp. 408-9.

6

Roger Kellaway, “Geographical change in Tasmania 1881-1891,” Australia 1888, 10, September, 1982, p. 38.

7 _{Henry Reynolds, “ ‘Men of Substance and Deservedly Good Repute’: The Tasmanian Gentry 1856-1875,”}

Australian Journal of Politics and History, 15 3, December, 1969, p. 61.

8 _{Reynolds, “ ‘Men of Substance and Deservedly Good Repute’: The Tasmanian Gentry 1856-1875,” p. 61.} 9

James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2008, pp 241 and 257.

10 _{MC Dillon, “Convict Labour and Colonial Society in the Campbell Town Police District: 1820-1839,”}

unpublished PhD thesis, History, University of Tasmania, 2008, pp. 70 and 72. She notes Leake, Horne, Wood and Crear as such families in the Midlands.

11

Miranda Morris, Placing Women: A Methodology for the Identification, Interpretation and Promotion of the Heritage of Women in Tasmania, Hobart: Government of Tasmania, 1997, p. 42.

12 _{P Hutchison, “The Leake and Mercer Families: A Study of the Rural Gentry in Colonial Tasmania,”}

unpublished (unconferred) BA Honours thesis, History, University of Tasmania, 1966.

13

BV Easteal, “Farming in Tasmania, 1840-1914,” unpublished MA thesis, History, University of Tasmania, 1971, p. 282.

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position to acquire more land, to ride out the troughs of the developing economy, and to maintain their productivity through modernisation in the ensuing decades of the nineteenth century. Patterns of settlement in Tasmania also advantaged the early settlers. The later arrivals not only had less option of tenure and scale. The problems of isolation from the colonial settlements of Hobart Town and Launceston meant these settlers had additional hardships associated with access to infrastructure and markets. Proximity to the main route from Hobart Town to Launceston was favoured because of access to easy transport.14

Rural towns developed along the main road. The Leake family business and social scene centred on two of these: Ross and Campbell Town.15 Ross was a military and convict centre up to the late 1850s and was also known for its fine quarries that produced building materials and grindstone. Its carved stone bridge, completed in 1836, marked the entrance to the town from the south. The mixed housing of its diverse population lined the main street alongside general stores, churches and hotels. The Ross Female Factory, with its yards, nursery, wash houses and solitary cells, processed hundreds of convict women between the years 1848 and 1854.16 Ross was also an education centre with highly regarded private schools for both boys and girls in the district that drew pupils from across the colony.

Campbell Town was the main commercial centre of the Midlands and included hotels, breweries, flourmills, black smithing and wheelwright shops, stores, churches and the public infrastructure needed to maintain the police, magistrates and the professions. Its promise was evident in 1829 as Mrs Augusta Princep recorded as she passed through, by gig, on a journey from Hobart to Launceston. ‘Campbell-town looked pretty with its long narrow bridge, or rather causeway, two hundred yards in length, over the Elizabeth River. It has a prosperous appearance, many good sized houses, a court house and jail already being built...’17 Chief agricultural crops were cereals, potatoes and mangolds, and sheep were the main grazing flock throughout the district.18 Three areas within the Campbell Town municipality were set

14 _{RW Giblin, The Early History of Tasmania, Volume 2, 1804-1828, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,}

1939, p. 296.

15 _{On his second tour of Van Diemen’s Land in 1821, Governor Macquarie had directed that five towns be}

established: Perth, Campbell Town, Ross, Oatlands and Brighton. See J.S. Weeding, A History of the Lower Midlands of Tasmania, Fourth Edition, Launceston: Regal, 1994; Basil Rait, The Campbell Town Story: Founded 1821, no publication details listed, no date.

16 _{Lucy Frost, ed., Convict Lives at the Ross Female Factory, Hobart: Convict Womens’ Press, 2011. The}

buildings had been converted from a male probation station.

17 _{Mrs Augustus Prinsep, “Hobart to Launceston [excerpt from The Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van}

Diemen’s Land, 1833],” in Hilary Webster, ed., The Tasmanian Traveller: A Nineteenth Century Companion for Modern Travellers, Canberra: Brolga Press, 1988, p. 7.

18

The Cyclopaedia of Tasmania, Volumes 1 & 2, Hobart: Maitland and Krone, 1900, Volume 1, p. 173. Mangolds were a beet crop grown for fodder.

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aside as towns and marked out with plans for inns, barracks and homes but they were never built beyond the sign posts.19 Campbell Town was planned as a stratified community with the better-off people having ten acre blocks separated from the small allotments for working men and their families.20 Leake owned a ten-acre town allotment, in Grant Street, which he leased out, as well as his estate acres.21

The geography of servitude

Stoney appeared untroubled that colonial Tasmania was essentially a convict landscape. He moved through the panorama on roads cut and levelled by gangs of men in irons. The natural features were augmented with walls of chiselled rock. His breakfast may well have included bread made from flour ground at the treadmill in the Launceston gaol.22 Most of the settlers’ houses Stoney admired, particularly those of successful or wealthy rural families, were vital convict apparatus as barracks and places of labour and as a favoured setting for reform.23

Inmates of the prison without walls were differentiated by their degree of autonomy. Those who arrived free were not bound by rules set down by a conviction: rather, they were constrained by the order and priorities of their place in the colony. Those who were sent unfree waited for liberty or elected to steal it. The free included the Leake family, their elite friends, their acquaintances and unbonded workers on the estate. Immigrant workers who were indentured to work on the estate, including in the house, were in an intricate relationship of obligation with the master. Convicts were not free. They occupied indoor and outdoor roles of varying degrees of status and hard labour. The state owned their labour power.24 Emancipists occupied a shadow land, neither unfree nor totally free for they were socially unsuitable even when they occupied an important work role.25

19 _{von Stieglitz, A Short History of Campbell Town and the Midland Pioneers, p. 56. The towns were Llewellyn,}

Maitland and Lincoln.

20 _{Geoff Dunacomb, A History of Campbell Town: ‘The Children of Erin,’ Launceston: Regal, undated, p. 88.} 21

Trudy Mae Cowley, 1858 Valuation Rolls for Central and Eastern Tasmania, Hobart: Trudy Mae Cowley, 2005, p. L2 63.

22 _{Flour was ground at the treadmill in Launceston Gaol until it was dismantled to make room for stone-breaking}

in 1856. Keith Preston, “Prison Treadmills in Van Diemen’s Land: Design, Construction and Operation, 1828 to 1856,” Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 60 2, 2013, p. 89.

23 _{There were exceptions. The outbuildings, granary, workshops and woolshed at Winton were built and used by}

free men for David Taylor did not use convict labour. “Winton Garden,” unpublished pamphlet, c2010.

24 _{David Meredith and Deborah Oxley, “Contracting Convicts: the Convict Labour Market in Van Diemen’s}

Land 1840-1857,” Australian Economic History Review, 45 1, March, 2005, p. 48.

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John Leake’s views on convict matters had been provided to Lieutenant Governor Eardly-Wilmot in response to his circular requesting advice on convict labour.26 Leake indicated that male and female convicts had distinct roles: men with farm duties, and the women servants in the house. John Leake described his attempts to instil hope in the convict and to encourage occupation, moral and intellectual development, and in so doing, indicated the paternalistic approach that underscored his treatment of convicts:

Being beyond the requisite distance from a place of worship I have always assembled my servants & family once on Sunday to hear the Church Service & a sermon read. The business of a Stock Farm seldom permitted more – but they could go to the Church or Chapel if they wished and such as could read, had books lent and the weekly newspapers.27

While he may have had their interests at heart, the convict labour assigned to John Leake enabled him to build a substantial estate. Leake provided the domestic infrastructure that ensured convicts were closely bound to Rosedale for shelter and provisions while also removing their opportunities for individuality. The social network for convict servants was limited by isolation and the attitude of the master’s family toward fraternisation. Leake’s control could limit the personal development and exercise of agency by individuals but, in the security it offered, those who were accepting of his role could be confident that they would prosper. Such occurrences were the quintessential outcome of paternalism: the convict system working at its best.

Religious observance was a central plank of respectability. From it derived notions of appropriateness in social and sexual relations, in love and marriage, in family, and in business dealings. Evangelical Anglicanism was the religion of the colonial middle class and remained within the established church. Shared concepts of family, home, gender roles and

responsibilities within religious belief enabled a shared class status.28 Atkinson suggests

26

Lieutenant Governor, Van Diemen’s Land, 1843-1846.

27 _{John Leake to Sir John Eardly-Wilmot, 31 September 1846, reproduced in Susan M Kemp, “John Leake}

1780-1865: Early Settler in Tasmania,” unpublished paper, York: St Johns College, 1969, p. 69. Copies of sermons by various authors delivered by Leake to the men, particularly in the 1830s, are included in Leake Papers, L1/ B1000-1021. Purchased books included Commentary on the Scriptures, London Encyclopaedia, Little Dorrit, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Mrs Gaugan’s Knitting Book. The Courier, GovernmentGazette, Examiner, PictorialTimes, Edinburgh Review, and Illustrated London News. All were purchased on subscription as per lists and accounts included in Leake Papers, L1/B882-5.

28

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850, London: Hutchinson, 1987, p. 74.

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paternalism was regarded as having a biblical basis.29 This was in accord with middle-class Protestant views. Religious observance was a key element in convict management, including on transports to the colony. Leake read prayers to his workers; Gatenby invited the local parson to do likewise and the scriptures were read to the women aboard the Anna Maria.30

A model based on prisoner separation was the form for prison design.31 Radial arms and a central inspection station underpinned the expectation of surveillance that was

considered fundamental to prisoner management. Rosedale formed an innermost panopticon hub which facilitated omniscient surveillance and functioned as the centre of the prison. It was not only the unfree who populated this prison. All who lived or worked there were enclosed by the rule of the master and his delegates, the terms of the pass holder contract, the controls of the master and servant legislation, the strictures of a society stratified by arrival category and gender, and the physical boundaries of the estate fences. The wider landscape was strewn with outbuildings of the convict system. Inmates moved between these sites – gaols, probation stations, hiring depots, and secondary prisons – on the basis of their failure or success in the scheme of reform. Prisoner management followed a continuum marked by freedom and confinement. Every convict worker at Rosedale had seen gaol and some experienced all the iterations of the system.32

Secondary prisons known and rightly feared as places of severe punishment were integral to offender management. They were placed only just inside the gallows on the continuum of freedom and confinement. Even so, some men chose the noose to escape the floggings and punishments of secondary prison by deliberately committing or confessing to a

29 _{Alan Atkinson, Camden, South Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia, 1988, p.33. Each of the}

following Bible references supports this view. Colossians 3:22, ‘Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservices, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.’ Colossians 4.1, ‘Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a master in heaven.’ Ephesians 6:5, ‘Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.’ Ephesians 6:9, ‘And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favouritism with him.’ www.kingjamesbibleonline.org and www.biblehub.com

30 _{John Leake to Sir John Eardly-Wilmot, 31 September 1846, in Kemp, John Leake 1780-1865: Early Settler in}

Tasmania,” p. 69; George Gatenby, “Diary of George Gatenby of ‘Bicton’ Campbell Town, 9 November 1847 to 31 January 1858,” Entry for 4 June 1854, Hobart: Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, 1847-58. NS 1255; William McCrea, “Surgeon’s Report, Anna Maria dated 22 September 1851 – 4 February 1852,” Hobart: Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, 1852, ADM/101/1.

31 _{Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: a Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, p.}

314. The panopticon penitentiary model was the basis of the design for a number of early Tasmanian gaols including the Launceston Female House of Correction and the separate prison at Port Arthur.

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capital crime.33 The ‘fortress’ of Port Arthur underpinned all elements of the penal system for the men who served at Rosedale during the 1850s.34 The construction of the separate prison at Port Arthur, commenced in 1848, implemented a key principle of the penitentiary. It placed prisoners in separate cells for ‘such segregation, accompanied by strict rules of silence, would allow inmates space in which to reflect on their crimes and thus be reformed.’35 Most convicts at Port Arthur worked outside their barracks. The work bell sounded the day’s labours and voices of command rang out.

The mass of pied yellow separated into sections, and to the ‘Get up’ and ‘Go on’ of the constables and overseers, diverged to the four outlets of Port Arthur. The boat’s crew passed to the water’s edge; the wood-fellers to Opossum Bay; the road-gang