Eugene Connor Prisoner 35/3290
Eugene Connor: Indoor Servant, Shipwreck Survivor and Convict. Born in County Kerry Ireland in 1805, he was single, literate and thirty years old, when convicted of embezzlement at the Killarney Quarter Session in April 1835 and sentenced to seven years transportation.[1]
Slightly built with dark brown hair, hazel eyes and 5’5” he was a man of his time and average in most respects, he would be almost indistinguishable from thousands of his convict compatriots.[2] His crime, described as ‘raising money under false pretences’ was one of deception, a less common type of crime for Irish Convicts,[3] and his experience of arrival in Australia in December 1835 on the only Convict Ship to wreck on mainland Australia was rarer still.[4]
As an ‘indoor servant’, Connor may have been used to a better lifestyle than many other inhabitants of Killarney, which in 1834 had a large poor and ‘idle’ population. The town itself having few redeeming features and described at the time as ‘two good streets; but many bad alleys, and close and filthy yards’.[5] Connor’s conviction effectively ended any level of comfort in his life and immediately after his sentence he would have been transferred to the Convict Hulk ‘Surprise’ moored at the Cove of Cork, where he would wait for a Convict Transport to Australia.[6]
Leaving Cork in mid-August 1835 on the barque Hive, 250 Irish Male Convicts along with a handful of passengers and a small contingent of soldiers from the 28th Regiment sailed under Capt. John Thomas Nutting.[7] They were a long and uneventful 112 days at sea sighting neither land nor other vessels when shortly before their anticipated arrival in Sydney on the night of December 10th, 1835, they were shipwrecked at Bherwerre Beach in New South Wales.[8] Errors in judgement by Capt. Nutting which were later proven to be the cause of the wreck, resulted in the Ship’s Surgeon Dr Anthony Donoghoe, and Chief Officer Edward Canney, taking temporary control immediately after the wreck, and to their credit only one life was lost during the transfer of passengers from the stricken vessel to the beach.[9]
While 200 or so convicts, passengers and the £10,000 of coins destined for the Commissariat were taken to Sydney within days of the wreck, a smaller group of convicts remained camped at wreck site, assisting with the salvage of luggage and cargo from Hive. Connor was finally admitted to the Sydney Gaol in January 1836.[11]
Arriving in New South Wales towards the end of the Assignment System which saw Convicts utilised as a source of free labour by Settlers and Landowners within the Colony, Connor was assigned to Irishman Laurence Harnett at Micalago Plains in the district of Argyle,[12] a remote and sparsely populated location to the south of Queanbeyan where Harnett ran sheep and lived with his wife and young family.[13]
The cost benefits of the assignment system for both the Government and Master were considerable; however, it was a matter of luck for both parties as to the type of Master or Convict the other would get in a system sometimes described as ‘akin to a type of slavery’.[15]
The Magistrate Bench records show us that Harnett, who would eventually become a Magistrate,[16] had ongoing problems with his ‘assigned servants’ including Connor and these records suggest there was perhaps a battle of wills between the two, as Connor seems undeterred by repeated harsh punishments. Twice early in his assignment Connor was recaptured after absconding and subsequently spent a year in a chain gang.[17] Harnett would have been well acquainted with two Magistrates at Queanbeyan; Captain Alured Tasker Faunce, known as ‘Ironman Faunce’ and James Wright, both of whom ruled on charges bought by Harnett against Connor. [18]
Often before the Magistrate’s Bench for various ‘crimes’ of disorderly conduct and neglect of duty, between October 1838 and December 1839 Connor was sentenced five times to receive some 250 lashes in total.[19] Harnett would describe him as “Careless and not inclined to do any work”, though Connor most often cited ill health, and seeking medical help as his reason for noncompliance. There is some irony in the notation “unable due to ill health to receive punishment” against the record of a punishment of 75 lashes in 1838 in which Connor cited ill health as his defence. [20] In March 1840, three months after a flogging sentence Connor was admitted to the General Hospital at Liverpool.[21]
In the early part of 1841 Connor then aged 36, possibly frustrated with the years of isolation and brutal punishments, robbed a store along with two of Harnett’s other assigned convicts, 22-year-old Irishman George Lynch and English convict John Bartlett aged 18.[23] At their trail in Berrima, Lynch was found not guilty, however Connor and Bartlett were sentenced to three years “to be worked in irons”[24] and were sent to the Towrang Stockade Penal Camp, which operated through the decade or so to 1843, beside the Wollondily River, east of Goulburn. Here Connor worked on the construction of The Great South Road from Sydney to Goulburn[25] and would have worn the woollen ‘parti-coloured’ black and yellow convict uniform and been shackled at the ankles.[26] In 1843 he twice passed through the prison at Berrima and was admitted to the North Paramatta Prison from Towrang on his way to Hyde Park Barracks in August of that year.
In January 1844 Connor’s Ticket of Leave was issued from the Campbellfield Bench and in April the location was altered to Bungonia.[27] It is likely this alteration came at his request as his social contacts and potential for employment would have been greater in the region around Goulburn where he had spent the last ten years. His Certificate of Freedom is dated September 1845,[28] though not advertised as ‘issued’ until September 1846. This is the last official record of Connor, effectively he disappears from the record books and to date no passenger list, land, marriage or birth records of children, nor a death record in Australia has been located which positively identifies him.
Figure 4 Butt of Certificate of Freedom.[29]
Location Map
