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growing grain, potatoes, turnips etc ., feeding pigs , and
in fact farming; the Government doing the hucksters-shop
part of the business and selling the articles in competition
with the then wretchedly low-priced produce of the oppressed
and tax ground free settlers, to whom the labour of the
gangs by day was thus made a curse instead of a benefit; and
by night they were robbed equally, but undisguisedly; and
occasionally murdered too, by the ill-guarded desperadoes, who
made forays round the neighbourhoods of these probation dens.
Add to which , they were ' pillaged by enormous taxes for the
maintenance of a large police force to keep the prisoners in
check . 15
No matter what Hal l's private opinions were, his livelihood
depended on the system and he was in no position to criticize. But his
settler friends were loud in their protests as Westbury and Deloraine
stations were regarded as particularly uneconomic to the Government:
during 1845 the value of all the articles produced by the convicts
amounted to £709.7 .5; in the same period the officers• salaries were
£1 ,554.2.3, leaving a deficit of £784 .14.7, exclusive of the expenses
of tools and stores used in the repair of the buildings.
The utter idleness of the entire swarm at many of the
Probation Stations was notorious . l6
commented Meredith .
Faced with a mounting financial burden , a growing numb er of
free' men unab le to find work which was monopolized by the probationers ,
increasing hostility from the settlers , and a steady realization that
the system would not work , the British Government found a scape goat in
Wilmot and removed him from office. Charles Joseph Latrobe,
Superintendent of the Port Philip District and later the first Governor
of Victoria, was appointed "Administrator" on October 13, 1846, with
instructions to examine the Probation Department carefully and minutely.
As a result many inefficient officers were dismissed and chang es
proposed in the system. Three months later on January 26, 1847, a new
Governor, Sir Wi lliam Denison, Knight , Captain of the Royal Engineers ,
arrived to put the recommended changes into effect . On January 10, 1849,
the Comptro ller-General in his report to the Governor wrote :
When I entered on the discharge of my present duties in
October, 1846, there were 39 male Convict Stations and
establishments in Van Diemen •s Land and 11,930 male convicts
maintained by Government, of whom 3,073 were eligible for
15 L.A. Meredith, Over the Straits (London, 1861) , p. 7.
., . 16
Ibid. p. 10 .