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Peopling Australia -
Convicts
Convict labour in colonial times is relevant to only two of the NSW ocean baths. Within the colony of NSW, convicts
normally engaged in developing the harbours at
Newcastle and Wollongong worked on the development of ocean baths at Newcastle
in the 1820s and Wollongong in the 1840s. Only one of
these convict-era ocean baths, the Newcastle Bogey Hole, is still in regular
use. Ocean baths were much slower to develop in Sydney, as bathing
enclosures on Sydney Harbour were for a long time the preferred sites for
safe bathing by Sydneysiders.
The key topics to consider are:
- Newcastle's first ocean baths,
and
- Wollongong's first ocean baths.
Newcastle's first ocean baths -
The Bogey Hole
In the 1820s, the bulk of the European population of the
convict colony of NSW was located in Sydney. To the north at the mouth of
the Hunter River, in a remote settlement created as place of secondary
punishment for convicts who re-offended after their arrival in the colony,
convicts laboured to improve a harbour to enable coal from the region's
mines to be shipped to Sydney and the wider world.
At a time when affluent free
citizens might choose not to bathe, soldiers, sailors, convicts and inmates
of hospitals could be compelled to bathe or be washed on sanitary grounds.
While the original instructions for the Newcastle settlement stipulated that
convicts be prevented from bathing outside the harbour, those restrictions
did not apply to the settlement's elite.
According to popular tradition, a
natural pool was enlarged by convict labour to create the ocean pool
initially known as the Commandant's Bath and later as the Bogey Hole. The
Bogey Hole retains evidence of convict-era excavation techniques. These
baths are most often associated with Major James Thomas Morisset, Commandant
of the Newcastle settlement from 1819-1822, though sometimes with associated
with Morisset's predecessor.
The 1820s Bogey Hole was a small pool some 15 feet long, seven feet wide and
six feet deep and clearly intended for bathing rather than swimming. Its creation was a minor
undertaking compared with the convict labour of burning lime, mining coal and creating
breakwaters and harbours, but this pool merits comparison with some of the
older sea baths on Britain's coast.
Newcastle's Bogey Hole was an elite
recreation space, not intended for use by most of the Newcastle population,
which included around a thousand convicts in Commandant Morisset's time, but
few women or children. The tourist trade was hardly a relevant consideration
when vessels were discouraged from visiting Newcastle and stringent measures
were enforced to reduce the risk of convicts stowing away on a visiting
vessel. Both the Bogey Hole and the nearby reserve laid out by Major
Morisset would become public places and visitor attractions, after Newcastle
became a free port and completion of its breakwater eliminated the need for
convict labour and soldiers.
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In the Illawarra district south of
Sydney, a settlement existed at Wollongong, even before the convicts and
soldiers occupied an area that became known as Flagstaff Hill, so that
convicts could labour to develop Wollongong's harbour. Until the Australian
Agricultural Company's monopoly on coal expired, that harbour had shipped
local farm produce, rather than coal from the Illawarra's extensive coal
seams.
The earliest baths developed at
Flagstaff Point (later known as the Chain Baths or the Nuns Pool) seem to
have been developed by the soldiers in Wollongong's stockade for their own
use. It had been a simple matter to create a small wall to hold back a body
of water between a cleft in the rocks to form a bathing place with a romantic,
gothic charm. Like the Newcastle Bogey Hole, this bathing pool soon catered
for a different set of patrons and was promoted as a visitor attraction.
That intrepid nineteenth-century
traveller, Lady Jane Franklin, noted that Wollongong's earliest bathing
place was in use as a bathing place for women and children in the 1830s. In
the 1840s, Governor Gipps granted permission for the use of convict labour
to improve the ocean pool used solely by women and
children. This request, and the Governor's consent to it, give an
interesting sense of the priorities then applying to the use of convict
labour.
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