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But there was a harsher, hidden side to the system. According to the historian: "Australia's remoteness would set free cruelty and madness." Except for Alexander Maconochie, the "one and only inspired penal reformer to work in Australia," every prison commander seemed determined to outdo his peers in sadism and bestial behavior. Major Joseph Foveaux, for example, liked to prescribe a bucket of salt water as treatment for a flogging of 200 lashes. Lieut. Colonel James Morisset, whose face was the "mask of an ogre" (courtesy of an exploding mine shell) had a temperament to match. And John Price, the "man Australians have loved to hate," whipped one man for mislaying his shoelaces and put another in chains for saying "good morning" to the wrong person.
There were prisons for children and prisons for "men on timber" (amputees with wooden legs). Worst was the notorious Norfolk Island, a place so evil that inmates would band together and plan suicide by lottery: the loser would be murdered by one man, others would witness the killing and thus gain a trip to Sydney for trial, a fate preferable to staying at Norfolk.
The British finally stopped sending convicts to Australia in 1868. England had by then invested in its first comprehensive penitentiary system, and moral reformers back home had drawn attention not only to the rampant cruelty but to sexual practices that made one youth exclaim to a visiting priest, "Such things no one knows in Ireland."
What, then, was the result of what Hughes scathingly calls "Britain's long enterprise of social excretion"? His countrymen may not be entirely pleased with his answers. He labels as a "consoling fiction" the conventional idea that "rebels are the main product of oppression." And he attributes the much acclaimed Aussie egalitarianism to the way free men united in hostility toward the convicts below them. That attitude spilled over into the general amnesia toward the country's checkered past. This exceptional book should finally jog the world's memory.