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Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
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Whatever the true meaning of its name, the story of the juvenile Port Arthur was the stuff of a Dickens novel, a Boys Town created by prejudice and justice at the heart of a rich and mighty Empire, its most remote outpost housing a generation of boys stolen away from whatever passed for their childhood and families. Here they were expediently despatched out of mind and sight to the last inhabited landform before Antarctica where, off-limits to anyone but a few approved visitors, the chain of Her Majesty’s justice would employ severe discipline and punishment to perhaps ‘save’ some and set them on the ‘right path’.
The author would have been drawn to the conflict of colonial administrators and their supporters lauding Point Puer as one of humanity’s ‘most successful and gratifying’ experiments, while others boldly denounced it as a cruel and failed expediency. What might he make of this murder story within a bigger convict story which was part of a bigger British society story? Would he see Point Puer boys as cold-hearted killers or as sad victims of a cold-hearted world? How would he judge the world’s greatest empire delivering unwanted children to exile on the other side of the world? Where was the true wickedness? Might he paint a picture that, like pieces of printing type, the true face of ‘mere men’ or ‘mere boys’ were only ever revealed when they were compressed together?
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