Brutal as the transportation regime was throughout British colonies in the 19th century, nowhere was worse than Norfolk Island, situated 1,400 kilometres east of the Australian coast. The contrast between its natural beauty and the cruelty of the convict regime struck many, both contemporary observers and later historians. Manning Clark noted: "It was a place where nature was lavish in her bounty and her beauty, but men behaved so vilely to each other that an earthly paradise became the Hell of the Pacific."
Take this account of Charles Anderson, a former navy apprentice whose behaviour had been erratic and violent after he was wounded in the head in the Battle of Navarino in 1827. Anderson's subsequent behaviour caused him, still in his teens, to be sentenced to seven years' transportation. A habitual absconder, he was regarded as a problem prisoner in the infant colony of New South Wales. John Clay, in this fascinating book, describes how Anderson was punished by being tethered to a rock (shades of Prometheus, without the fire) on a small island in the bay.
"Regarded as a wild beast, he became one of the sights of Sydney harbour, and visitors would pass by in boats and throw bits of bread to him. Exposed to all weathers, his back and shoulders were covered in sores from his repeated floggings. Maggots fed on his flesh. He was denied water to bathe his wounds, 'such denial being not an unusual portion of the punishment to which he had been condemned'."
After even more misadventures, Anderson was sent to the site of the final solution, Norfolk Island. He was treated there much as he had been in Sydney, when Alexander Maconochie, an energetic Scotsman with a somewhat more illustrious naval background, arrived to take control of the island settlement in 1840.
Three years later, when George Gipps, the governor of New South Wales and the associated settlements, came to inspect Norfolk Island, "he was astounded to have Anderson pointed out to him, now trimly dressed in a sailor's garb and going about his business", which was charge of a signal station and garden on the highest point of the island.
Anderson was one of the successes of Maconochie's methods (although his madness returned in later life). From being treated as a freak, not human, he was given full dignity in accordance with the beliefs of the commanding officer. These sprang out of Maconochie's experience in education: he had built and run a school in Scotland after noting the dearth of schools in the area where his young family was growing up. He had also spent time in Quebec, where he noticed the best way to make sure seamen on his ship returned on time after shore leave was to place them in teams, and make sure an outgoing man had to wait for his team member to return before he could taste liberty. Simple and obvious as it seems, this was revolutionary in its day, as were many of Maconochie's ideas. He introduced that rare thing, an abiding humanitarian consideration for all people, into his class-ridden peer group. His ideas were too much of a departure for many of his careful colonial bureaucrats. His three years on Norfolk Island were a running battle with authority, in the shape of Gipps, Lord Russell - then Colonial Secretary back in London - and Gipps's chief civil servant, E. Deas Thompson. It is easy to imagine this story filmed, something in the grand tradition of Billy Budd or Mutiny on the Bounty, with Richard E. Grant as Maconochie, and somebody like Trevor Howard as Gipps, viewing with alarm the revolutionary notions of giving prisoners a sense of worth and motivation to behave themselves. Thompson was obviously the Sir Humphrey of the tale.
When Maconochie arrived in 1840, one of his first achievements was a celebration of the birthday of the young Queen Victoria, which featured pork and a light punch for the island's 700 inmates, fireworks, and a theatrical programme, performed by prisoners. This was to give the men some idea that there could be pleasure in life. Unfortunately, the reputation of this event ignored its noble and brave underpinning, and concentrated on what would have been tabloidesque tales of rum and festivals for hardened criminals. Maconochie's "luxury" colony was lampooned and from then on he had to rein in his schemes, although he did persevere with his main plan, a system of rewards counting as "marks" which reflected improvement in a convict's conduct and also went to purchase simple comforts such as tea and sugar.
Many of his prisoners on Norfolk Island were Irish. His "catchment" covered many of the era's political prisoners, such as the Whiteboys. He noted their distinctive qualities, one of which, surprising to 21st-century ears, was that the Irish were not given nearly as much to bad language as the English. Furthermore, "if you desire an English convict to do any particular thing, unless you either order him by name . . . so as to point out the identical person you mean, seldom a man will stir; while in an Irish convict ship, on the contrary, if you merely chance to look around as if you wanted something, half a dozen will start up, to anticipate your wishes".
Maconochie was recalled after three years of the authorities fretting over his wild schemes. Back in London, he tried for another appointment, to the Chatham Islands, where he could continue his work, but failed. He resorted to the publication of a stream of pamphlets, one of which came out in 1846 with a detailed exposition of his mark system. He met Charles Dickens, who became an adherent of his ideas.
Maconochie died in 1860. On Norfolk Island, where only two of the 920 men who underwent his system ever re-offended, his leaving marked the deluge. The ensuing harsh regime caused a mutiny in 1846, in which 22 people died.
The author of this book, who has previously written biographies of John Masters and R.D. Laing, became interested in Maconochie in light of his own work with troubled adolescents, and giving them a fresh start. Clay was one of the founders of Britain's Peper Harrow community for troubled teenagers in the 1970s. He talks, for example, of how it was possible to give barely educated kids a classical education once they had access to simple myth collections. This book is an interesting historical document, but it also has resonance with the continuing human challenge to give reality to the concept of reform.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist