Fourteen Years Hard Labour

by Prue Batten

If, like me, the generations of one’s family in Tasmania can be traced back to Settlement, then it is a fair enough assumption to believe there exists a convict somewhere in the family tree. My great great grandfather was such a man.

William Owen Millington was born on the 10^th June, 1810. Where in England is not known precisely but given that he married his first wife, Mary, in Chipstead in 1836 and that he was tried and found guilty of his crime in Chichester in 1837, one must draw a circle around those areas and assume he and his family lived within that circle.

I rather like the description of Chipstead in the Domesday Book: its assets being three hides, seven ploughs, one mill, and woodland worth five hogs. I’m sure if William had realised that the whole of the Chipstead estate had been worth so little in the Domesday Book that he may not have followed the path he took so many years later. But then we know, don’t we, that value is a relative thing?

Convict carved highway milestone

Starvation is a terrible thing and as a carpenter he was unable to provide as he may have wished. At the age of twenty seven, William stole two sheep for the sustenance of his growing family. Found guilty of the theft, he was tried and sentenced to transportation to the penal island of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), where fourteen years hard labour was to be completed. His marriage with Mary, like that with all transported convicts, was annulled as he left.

Woodwork such as William would have done

He was transported from Southampton on the William Bemtick and after sailing in miserable hulk conditions to the other side of the world, arrived in Hobart on 26^th of August, 1838. Tasmania as a penal colony had been in existence for some 30 years at this point and the town of Hobart had been established and outlying settlements were growing with the opening up of valuable agricultural holdings. The town of Bothwell in the Central Highlands of Tasmania was one such and it was William’s good fortune that he was a competent carpenter and was sent there to serve his time, indentured to a resident vicar.

Bothwell was a town that served large pastoral estates of cattle and sheep graziers and in the first two decades of its settlement, churches, a school, soldiers’ barracks and hotels were built, so there was scope for William to tow the line and earn his pardon.

One of the Bothwell houses

No convict could work for money, it was a condition of the sentence. At best he had minimal shelter, clothing and sustenance and could expect no more, so one wonders why my great great grandfather could have been so ill advised as to present an invoice for his work to the vicar. He was of course lashed, how many times we are unable to ascertain, but enough to make sure he trod the straight and narrow through the hot highland summers and freezing winters that Bothwell offered, until he became a free man in 1851.

I always wonder why he didn’t hasten then to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo on the mainland for what is euphemistically called the Great Australian Goldrush. And where it is often claimed, the true Australian identity began to form. Instead, with the desire for major wealth no doubt beaten out of him, he settled in Hobart and married again – to a widow called Elizabeth in Saint David’s Church of England, later Hobart’s Saint David’s Cathedral. He continued his carpentry trade but as often happened with carpenters historically, also became a Hobart undertaker.

Remains of a "humane" cell at Port Arthur

William Owen Millington was lucky to be sent to Bothwell as an indentured convict rather than be shipped to the misnamed ‘model’ (meaning humane) prison of Port Arthur, lucky too that the infamous hell hole of Sarah Island in the far west had ceased operations in 1833. In both instances he may well have been lucky to survive. His trade was a gift, the opening of pastoral lands with towns close by a godsend, and he lived to tell the tale.

As members of the family have tried to track down William’s descendants in England, it has become obvious that many don’t know that ‘lost’ William was in fact a convict. Perhaps there remains the need to ignore such skeletons whereas here in the colonies, one knows one has truly ‘made it’ if one can show such a thing in one’s own ancestry.

What I find most astonishing is that this many years later, William’s great great great grandson, my own son, is a qualified joiner and carpenter but also, ironically, a working member of a family of sheep farmers.

* Prue’s first foray into historical fiction is set in medieval times and was recently #3 behind Jane Austen and Lucinda Brant in Amazon Kindle rankings.

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