The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

2019 335p.

SPOILER ALERT

At a time when we’re all locked in our houses because of coronavirus, it seemed apposite to read about other people who had also been locked down. I had been sent this book for review an embarrassingly long time ago, and so I settled down with it, expecting to read about a convict transport ship bearing mainly women passengers bound for New South Wales. I was surprised to end up in a completely different continent, with many of its female convict passengers integrating into a Spanish-speaking community, in many cases leaving their convict history far behind. It’s quite a rattling tale, and one with which I was not familiar.

The convict ship Lady Shore set sail from Portsmouth on 22 April 1797 with 66 female prisoners, 2 male prisoners, 40-something ship’s officers and some 70-odd members of the New South Wales Corps, some of whom were accompanied by their wives and children (the sources give differing numbers). It never made it to Sydney. On 1 August the ship was seized by mutineers, largely drawn from amongst the French, German and Spaniard prisoners of war who had been conscripted against their will into the New South Wales Corps.  One wonders why the British government ever thought that this would be a good idea. With the rallying cry “Vive La Republique!” they took control of the ship near the Brazilian coast, supplemented by other disaffected Irish and English members of the NSW Corps. The captain, chief mate and one of the mutineers were killed. A longboat, containing 29 people including officers, soldiers and some sailors, wives and children, was set adrift from the commandeered ship, reaching shore at San Pedro Rio Grand the next afternoon.  They gradually made their way to Rio de Janeiro, and in many cases, back to London where the mutiny was reported to the government.

Meanwhile, the mutineers and their cargo of female convicts set sail for Montevideo. Because France had defeated Spain during 1794 as part of the Revolutionary Wars, the mutineers felt (correctly) that they would receive the protection of the Spanish government, and they were eventually released, and even financially benefited from taking the ship as a prize of war. One of the ringleaders finally faced British justice and was hanged for the murder of Captain Willcox when he was apprehended some time later. There was little British concern about the female convicts, many of whom converted to Catholicism and blended into Buenos Aires society.

The author, Elsbeth Hardie is a journalist in New Zealand. Before writing this book, she had written another non-fiction book The Girl Who Stole Stockings, based on the life of her maternal ancestor, Susannah Noon, who was sentenced to transportation for the theft of stockings when she was twelve years old. Although this 1794 journey of the Lady Shore carried female convicts, they play a minor role in this book- as, indeed, they did in the eventual outcome of the mutiny.

The book is written as a chronological narrative history, divided up by subheadings but not into separate chapters. While this does drive the action forward, there is little shaping of an argument as such. The author describes the drawn-out nature of imprisonment prior to embarkation on a convict transport ship, and gives a good picture of the New South Wales Corp ‘enlistment’ which verged on impressment during the Napoleonic Wars, when any half-decent soldier was deployed in fighting rather than guarding convicts on the other side of the world.  I did find myself transfixed by the ‘what next?’ nature of the first part of the book, especially during the mutiny and the immediate aftermath. It was much written about at the time, by both participants and in the newspapers, and Hardie balances competing (and somewhat self-serving) narratives to give a detailed account of events.

The narrative splinters somewhat when it comes to tracing the outcomes for the women convicts. Here Hardie relies- with appropriate acknowledgement- on the work of Argentinian scholar Joseph M. Massini Ezcurra in the 1950s, whose work was taken up by Juan M. Méndez Avellanada writing from the 1980s and whose book Las Convictas de la Lady Shore was published in English in 2008. When the female prisoners arrived, they were located in a Bethlemite convent called La Residencia in Buenos Aires. From there, they found work as servants in Buenos Aires families, married, and disappeared into respectability or – in relatively few cases – moved into prostitution and petty crime. Most converted to Catholicism, either through conviction or as a survival mechanism, and blended into society. Their names in the records were often rendered into their Spanish translation e.g. Susannah King became Susana Rey; Lucy Whitehouse became Lucia Blanco. Sometimes their names were written phonetically; other women reverted to their maiden names or adopted another names. At this point, the genealogical detail of the hunt tends to swamp the narrative.

The discussion of sources appears, rather strangely, at the end of the book. This could be the author’s way of bringing the story into the 20th and 21st century.  Texts and sources continued to appear as recently as 2012, when Sotheby’s sold the diary of Thomas Millard, the ship’s carpenter, which was purchased by a private buyer and has disappeared since. It was a strange way to finish the book, and I felt that it cried out for a concluding chapter, drawing out the major themes and rounding off the story.

I found myself likening this book to Cassandra Pybus’ Truganini (my review here), not in terms of content, but in its avoidance of secondary literature and sidestepping of academic work that would have added so much to this book. In this case, I don’t know whether it is because Hardie has a journalist, rather than historian, background or whether, as in Pybus’ case, it is a more deliberate authorial choice. In her descriptions of the prison system and the women’s crimes, I found myself thinking back to E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters (my review here) which explains the ‘mission creep’ of the Black Act in the protection of property and the distortions it created in sentencing decisions and leading to so many commutations of life sentences to transportation. Greg Dening did such an excellent job in talking about naval discipline, leadership,character and mutiny in Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, which I would have loved to have seen Hardie draw on when discussing the rather pusillanimous (and young) Ensign William Minchin of the NSW Corps. And what would Kirsten McKenzie, one of my favorite historians and author of Scandal in the Colonies and A Swindler’s Progress (my review here) done with Major James Semple, imposter extraordinaire and one of her most robust characters and informants? In Semple’s life (or rather, lives), and in the lives of the women convicts, Hardie gives us multiple examples of the slipperiness of identity in colonial port cities that McKenzie explores so well.

Nonetheless, I am again wishing for a different book, rather than the one I have in my hands.  By her focus on one example, Hardie draws a vivid picture of global politics as it played out on the high seas during the Revolutionary Wars. She captures well the coerced nature of life in the NSW Corps, and highlights the elisions between role of prisoner, guard, sailor and soldier. Far from a lonely ship sailing off onto the high seas, she paints a picture of a network of ships, criss-crossing the globe and circulating different ports, not unlike those maps of flight paths in the back of the airline magazine when we used to be able to fly. Particularly the first half of her book is engrossing narrative history, and I must admit that I  have not often had to put ‘Spoiler Alert’ at the start of a review of a history!

Sourced from: review copy from Australian Scholarly Press.

2014, 256 p.

After finally finishing the harrowing The Discomfort of Evening, I needed something to laugh at. I knew that I had Judith Lucy’s book on my shelves, so I dug it out. I had read her Lucy Family Alphabet, which I enjoyed. I expected that this book would be in the same vein, but it took me into more of the same destructive behaviour (albeit in a more adult and benign form) that confronted me so much in Rijneveld’s book. Perhaps it was probably not the best choice of comedy writing after all. 

Judith Lucy has been mining her life for comedy gold for years. She speaks with a rather affected, yet Aussie, drawl which is both annoying and highly distinctive. Her focus is almost entirely on her own life. However, being ten (well, thirteen) years younger than I am, I quite enjoy watching her going through lifestyle changes that I’ve already experienced, and I now champion her as a middle-aged female comedian. The first third of this book is a subversion of the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon which fortunately passed me by, and she certainly did drink, smoke and pass out, become too involved with the wrong men, and end up needy and full of fragile bravado.

Fortunately Judith Lucy does eventually move on from the alcohol, bongs and unconsciousness. Starting off as a tale of a dissolute life, it ends up as an exploration of spirituality. In this regard, it’s almost like the companion book to her television program Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey. I’m not averse to a bit of spiritual tourism myself, but I can imagine that some readers would be rather put off by the change in direction.

So, it was not quite the refuge from The Discomfort of Evening that I thought it would be, given that both books deal in different ways with physical self-harming and religion. But give me Judith Lucy any day.

My rating: 7.5

Sourced from: my own bookshelves

I have included this on the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Revised and expanded by Ray Silverman, 2000, 146 p.

This book, originally called My Religion, was written by Helen Keller in 1927,when she was 47 years old. She was certainly not the little girl standing beside the water pump in the garden any more. After graduating from Radcliffe College, Helen Keller had already achieved fame through the publication of her autobiography in 1903. Between 1920 and 1924, when money was tight, she and her teacher Ann Sullivan joined the vaudeville circuit, where they conducted two twenty-minute shows each day, as celebrity acts. Her family certainly disapproved of this way of earning money, and Ann Sullivan didn’t enjoy it. From 1924 onwards she became an ambassador and fundraiser for the American Foundation of the Blind- a far more ‘respectable’ role. This gave her a public profile and a platform to publicize the needs of the blind, but also to share her religious beliefs with the wider world.

As she tells it, since making her connection between language and the world, Helen Keller had had a spiritual hunger. She ‘spoke’ with the rector of Trinity (Episcopalian) Church Boston, Phillips Brooks about some of her religious questions but her main spiritual guide was the assistant to family friend Alexander Graeme Bell, Swiss-born John Hitz.  He introduced her to the writings of the famous 18th century Swedish theologian, scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg when she was in her early teens and he continued to support her spiritual development for the rest of his life. This book of a series of essays was, in a slightly different form, published as My Religion.

It’s hard to know how to read religious writing, especially when you don’t share the writer’s convictions. Keller was often criticized for the “literary-ness” of her writing, and that is certain true here, where she is writing in the devotional-writing genre which by its nature seeks to use words to capture emotion and reflection about the spiritual world.

This re-ordered edition starts with a biography of Helen Keller written by Dorothy Hermann, whose longer biography I reviewed here. It then moves through a series of chapters where Keller writes first, about her own religious development, and then about Swedenborg’s life and writings. I must confess that I found these Swedenborg chapters heavy going. They were fairly lengthy and wordy, and I was not particularly comfortable with her full-throated adulation of Swedenborg’s ideas. I wondered if the context in which I was reading them was wrong, so I decided to read them after my morning meditation, when I’m in a more contemplative mood. They still remained turgid and flat. However, I did enjoy the shorter chapters near the end of the book, which did lend themselves to ‘devotional’-type reading.

I was particularly interested in the editor’s note at the end of the book. Helen Keller did not find writing easy. She admitted that she found it hard to distinguish her own words (i.e.  words that she generated) from words that had been spelled out onto her hand by someone else. She was not able to skim-read what she had written previously, and when she was interrupted, she lost her thread. Parts of this book had been written years earlier and pasted into the manuscript. She certainly was not happy with her draft of My Religion which she handed over for publication, hoping that someone else would be able to do the editorial work that she could not. But it was published unedited and remained in print in its original form until this revision and expansion in 1994 with a second edition in 2000. The editor, Ray Silverman, himself a Swedenborgian from Bryn Athyn (New Church i.e. Swedenborgian- University) rearranged the segments, and put them into more coherent chapters. He added some material from of Keller’s other writings or speeches, and did remove a small amount of the original text.

I must confess that I would never have read this book had I not been preparing a talk on Helen Keller. It’s certainly not light reading in a genre that has a limited audience.

Sourced from: purchased e-book