Fifteen years equals 5479 days



 Ephraim spent a month in the Hospital at Port Arthur



Every now and then, while researching a family history, you come across something which surprises you and totally changes the visions you have had. When I was in primary school, I was given very poorly copied tracings of convicts to colour in and told that all the convicts were sent out for stealing a handkerchief or a loaf of bread. Countless other students in other schools had the same lesson. At one time, it was not fashionable to have a convict in the family and everything was done to hide the digressions of ancestors. Convicts almost seemed like imaginary beings. These lessons on convicts came between a lesson on Greek mythology and “Alfred burnt the cakes.” Tasmania's past was hidden in among many unrelated stories. Obviously schools were into teaching lack of depth, no understanding and irrelevance.

I started learning about convicts again, much later on and discovered that the chain around the leg was not a permanent fixture and that there were different classes of convicts and different systems of dealing with them. When Ephraim was sent off to Port Arthur, there were rules about how he was to be punished and how he was to be imprisoned. First, prisoners were to be held in solitary for a time – unless they were 60 years old or more. By my reckoning, Ephraim was about 50 but he had managed to have his age raised by 10 years so he may have missed out on this little gem. He also was still recovering from his broken arm so could not be put to work in the forests in a hurry.



Model of pig farm, Port Arthur



As time has passed, more and more records have surfaced and been microfilmed and it came to be that these included work books from Port Arthur. Only two of these remain and one of these covers the middle portion of Ephraim’s years at Port Arthur. Suddenly, instead of just placing him at the scene, I was able to see exactly what he was up to while a prisoner there. This document begins in September 1868, so he had already been there for nearly 12 months. At the top of the page, his sentence is given as 5479 days, the unexpired amount being 5057 days. A little bit of addition shows that his sentence has been backdated to the day of his arrest. Ephraim arrived at PA on 4^th November 1867. His first year will remain a mystery but at the end of 1868, he was working in the clearing gang. This would have been heavy work and he may have been grateful to move to the pig farm in December. One of his granddaughters told her family that he was the first man to bring pigs into Tasmania. Well, he certainly worked with pigs but this was a rather grand exaggeration of reality. For five months he tended the pigs before he was moved to the position of wardsman in the penitentiary. A little more research might give me a list of his duties there. October, he was sick in hospital and with no medical benefits, he missed out on his monthly pay of 1/1. That’s about 13 cents a month – not a big income, but I was surprised to find that convicts were paid at all. To get over his illness and get out into the fresh air, Ephraim spent a month looking after no 1 chain gang before moving back to the penitentiary for several more months. He became a private servant for three months before becoming cook at Long Bay which was a logging area just north of Port Arthur. I wonder how he felt on all those occasions that he had to cook lamb.

Building at pig farm Port Arthur

As this folio page ends, Ephraim has 3914 days of his sentence to go and has earned the grand total of £2.2.3. Unfortunately, the folio containing further entries no longer exists, but it is great to have been able to understand a little of his personal story at Port Arthur.