Like a Wicked Noah’s Ark: The Nautical School Ships Vernon & Sobraon
This book makes lively use of institutional and court records, as well as children’s testimonies, to bring to life the experiences of boys housed on industrial training ships moored in Sydney Harbour until 1911. It makes a great contribution to our understanding of state interventions in the lives of the poor in late-nineteenth century society.
READ REVIEW
↓
Like a Wicked Noah’s Ark:
The Nautical School Ships Vernon & Sobraon
Sarah Luke | October 2020
It can be tough being a kid. You need only view the lost, wistful face of little man Stephen Carroll (picture 38) and read his testimony when the police picked up this eight-year-old wandering the road near Orange, humping his bluey.
I do not remember when she [mother] died. I was four years old then … I wanted to go to school. I then lived with a man who used to send me for horses (I don’t know his name). He beat me with a whip because I played. I ran away in the train and a policeman sent me here. (p. 192)
‘Here’ was the New South Wales industrial training ship the Vernon, moored in Sydney Harbour near Cockatoo Island following the passage of the ‘Act for the Relief of Destitute Children’ (Industrial Schools Act), 1866. The Vernon was replaced by the larger Sobraon from 1892 to 1911.
The use of training ships to educate children who were homeless or living rough was derived from English practice and in New South Wales was a ground-breaking experiment that stopped the revolving door for children whose every minor offense landed them in Darlinghurst Gaol. Vagrancy was a crime, and while it was necessary for a boy to be arrested and sent to the ship on the orders of a magistrate, these ships’ function was confused in some minds back then, and in later historical representations. Sarah Luke is at pains to stress that the training ships were not places of punishment, not juvenile gaols.
This book is based on the wealth of archival material available concerning this state experiment in rescuing children. It paints a lively picture of life on board these ships under the three superintendents who ran them. Captain James Mein oversaw the Vernon for its first 12 years and, despite being a man who was ‘irritated by children and who appeared to enjoy hitting them’ (p. 29), there are positive testimonies from boys, like that of John McGrane, who wrote to Mein as a ‘dear friend’ and observed that it was a great day when he was placed on the Vernon (p. 67).
Mein was succeeded by the charismatic Frederick Neitenstein. During his long reign from 1878 to 1896, life on board became positively enlightened, with a focus on rewarding good behaviour rather than punishment. The third and final Captain, William Mason, had served under Neitenstein and kept to the practices established by him.
For life on the ships think sailor suits, nautical skills, hard work, and discipline. But also think picnics, gardening, and playing cricket on Cockatoo Island. There was a library, a games room, craft lessons and excursions. The boys kept pets, a regatta raised money for musical instruments, and eventually the ship’s band played in the botanical gardens on weekends. Dignitaries like Sir Henry Parkes and the irrepressible restauranteur Quong Tart put on events for the boys.
After a year or two on board, the boys were apprenticed to various trades and given rural placements, while still under the auspices of the superintendent of the ship, often until they reached 18 years of age.
Luke oscillates between describing the boys as ’the petty thieves, pickpockets and burglars which the rest of the population feared’ (p. xvii) and as just very poor little kids. No doubt there were plenty of variations along this spectrum. Like the 19th-century reformers she writes about, Luke teases at the question of whether the experiment was successful, as measured by the subsequent lives and fortunes of the thousands of Vernon and Sobraon boys, although she acknowledges that this is somewhat of an impossible task, given that time spent on board was usually limited to a few years.
Luke is an unforgiving critic of poor or vicious parenting. No doubt ‘parental interference’ was a problem for some boys as it certainly was for the superintendents. For example, Luke paints a picture of some of the early failures of the system, such as the three Cassidy brothers, whose parents she depicts as a rough, drunken and foulmouthed lot of criminals. By any measure they were a rotten lot, parents and children alike. All the same, I was surprised the author found it ‘incredible’ that one of the boys wrote a letter asking his mother to visit. The strong bonds of family, even in family situations that the rest of us view as atrocious and cruel, are well documented. Nothing good ever came from the criminal Cassidys, but even so, the current recognition of the harm done to children through institutionalisation, as well as our knowledge of the misery caused to the stolen generations, might have resulted in a little more nuance over family separation issues. Anyway, many of the Vernon and Sobraon boys benefited from the system, judging from the letters they wrote expressing their gratitude for the life skills learned from their time on board.
This is a good read. It is the story of a well-run institution. Nothing about it resonates with references to Charles Dickens and hulks on the Thames, but I will leave readers to ponder why the inappropriate title was chosen, except perhaps that it grabs attention.
This book will be useful to historians and sociologists concerned with the ongoing challenges of the appropriate role of the state in the management of ‘at risk’ children. As Luke explains, by the last years of the experiment the Sobraon had morphed more into a reformatory type of institution as changing legislation favoured the ‘boarding out’ system of placing children in so-called ‘good homes’. Eventually the state came understand that if it could pay strangers to look after kids, then it could also pay the actual mothers. The obsessive fear the authorities had of releasing the children back to the family, and the emphasis on placing them in apprenticeships far away from Darkest Sydney, gave way to more generous attempts at keeping families together.
It is salutary to read this book right now, at a moment when many nations have openly criticised Australia’s barbaric practice of imprisoning ten-year-olds in adult gaols.
Reviewer: Dr Shirley Fitzgerald, PHA (NSW & ACT)
Like a Wicked Noah’s Ark is published by Arcadia, an imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing.