There's a certain percentage of people over the age of 50 who can remember the existence - and sometimes liberal application - of corporal punishment in schools.
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Of those, there's a percentage who will vouch the use of the cane, strap or stick 'did them no harm', and it was a legitimate form of punishment. Others will vehemently disagree, arguing the imposition of physical violence on a child is an outrageous violation, prone to bias and abuse.
Curiously, the use of beatings in schools was made illegal in 1983, a full decade after its abolition in another altogether more punitive institution - the prison.
Ballarat has a curious diverse relationship with the use and imposition of beatings and floggings. On one hand, its magistrates and Ballarat Gaol had an unenviable reputation as being particularly fond of sentencing men and boys (for whom the punishment was reserved in Victoria) to the lash, says Federation University's Doctor David Waldron.
At the same time the Victorian Government's 1871-2 proposed amendments to the Criminal Law and Practice Statutes (1864), which would have allowed the lashing of youths for misdemeanours and 'larrikinism', was so fervently opposed in Ballarat a crowd of 3000 people attended a public meeting at the Alfred Hall, where the mayor W.C, Smith described the bill as a "disgraceful measure".
Dr Waldron and post graduate researcher Natalie Ford have compiled an extensive history of the punishments delivered at the Ballarat Gaol and the public attitude to them, which they will feature at this year's Heritage Weekend in May.
The pair have also collected an array of artefacts to display, including goods made by prisoners and uniforms of the gaol's staff which have not been seen in Ballarat since they were issued.
A leather strap, astonishingly used for 'discipline' at the Ballarat School of Mines and preserved at Federation University also be on display.
Made of two pieces of thick hide stitched together and about a metre long, it would have inflicted severe pain and quite readily broken flesh.
"It's certainly a much thicker than a belt," Dr Waldron says..
"It would do significant damage."
The philosophies of punishment of the time are encapsulated in the Royal Commission on Penal and Prison Discipline published by the government in 1871. Put simply, imprisonment, corporal, and capital punishment were thought to have two purposes:
"The purposes for which the punishment of offenders takes place are twofold; the first, that of deterring others, exposed to similar temptations, from the commission of crime; the second, the reformation of the criminal himself."
At the time of this commission, flogging was deemed an appropriate part of sentencing for "crimes accompanied with personal violence, and for unnatural offences."
"Unnatural offences", which at the time included same-sexual relations and intercourse with animals, was the crime with which the unfortunate Ah Chew, a Chinese man, was flogged for, in one of Ballarat's earliest recorded descriptions of the use of the cat-o'-nine tails.
Ah Chew was convicted in 1871 of "attempted buggery with an underage boy" (newspapers of the time described it as "an unmentionable offence") and sentenced to two years' imprisonment and "three private whippings of 25 lashes each with the cat-o'-nine tails..."
A 'private' whipping was one which took place in the confines of a prison, as opposed to a public flogging. Ah Chew (or Ah Munn or Ah Chen according to differing news reports) had been denied a jury composed of any of Chinese nationals or speakers, and was sentenced the day after the verdict.
His whipping took place in the yard of Ballarat Gaol on December 22, 1871, and was described in bloody and excruciating detail by the Ballarat Star and The Courier, as well as being carried in newspapers across the colony.
"At three o'clock the prisoner was taken from his cell and placed in the hands of Bamford (the common hangman), who had been brought up specially from Melbourne Gaol (where he himself was a prisoner) in charge of the senior turnkey.
"The Chinaman was stripped to the waist, and submitted readily to the tricing-up operation, his legs being roped to the triangle at the bottom, and his hands secured by straps above his head to each of the uprights.
"Bamford regarded the 'cats' with an air of affection as he took them from his carpet bag, divested himself of his coat and waistcoat, tucked up his shirt sleeves, laid on his blows with a will. The Chinaman winced at the first cut, shivered at the second, writhed and screamed as each succeeding blow brought his back into the condition of a discolored mass of quivering flesh.
"The right shoulder received the most severe punishment, as the knots of the cat fell mostly on that spot. When the twenty fifth lash had been delivered the prisoner was unstrapped and taken back to his cell, moaning loudly on the way."
(The Courier, December 23, 1871)
Ah Chew was to receive a further two floggings, each of 25 lashes.
The willingness to flog Ah Chew stands in contrast to the campaign already being supported in England to do away with flogging, brought on by the death of Corporal Frederick John White in 1846. White died after receiving 150 lashes for touching an officer with a metal bar during an argument. His painful death led almost immediately to the Duke of Wellington reducing the maximum number of lashes a soldier could receive at a time to 50, and to the abolition of the punishment in the military altogether by 1881.
In fact, says Dr Waldron, floggings with the "cat" were extremely rare in Ballarat, and there are only three reported instances of male offenders being whipped in the gaol.
It seems the law looked less kindly on what it deemed transgressions against the moral order - and on less privileged nationalities and classes. It also looked unkindly on what the public termed 'larrikins' - young men who were a challenge to the order and decency of the day.
By the 1870s gangs of youths - 'pushes' - were common in the capitals and large cities, and a kind of righteous panic set in about their behaviour. They were accused of violence, assaults, foul language and theft, and calls went up, as they have always, for 'something to be done'.
It was regarded as enough of a phenomenon to be referred to by name in the Blair Royal Commission pages of 1871:
"Take the case of a father and mother who, simply because a boy may be difficult to manage, allow him to lead a criminal life? No doubt a great deal of the evil now commonly called "larrikinism" arises from the neglect of the parents," the commissioners wrote.
The commissioners railed against the imprisonment of young offenders with 'hardened criminals', noting the outcome was invariably the 'debasement of the youth's character' rather than any improvement. Instead, they suggested better results might be obtained with what they demurely termed 'personal chastisement'.
"The chastisement should in all cases be inflicted with a 'birch rod,' never made of with the lash, and in no case should any sentence be for more than five-and-twenty stripes, all to be inflicted at one time," they suggested.
The birch rod was similar to the rattan cane used as a form of punishment in many schools until the 1980s; however the victim was strapped to a bench, stripped and then beaten.
Dr Waldron says the flogging of juveniles with the birch rod was prevalent. Natalie Ford's research into the prison records show that juveniles under the age of 21 were flogged consistently, although infrequently, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly for sexual offences. Indeed, he says, Ballarat courts were more likely to sentence juveniles to the birch than any other Victorian court.
"The idea was it was disciplining the criminal," Dr Waldron says of the thinking behind corporal punishment.
"The idea was the skin almost acted as a shield to the soul, and by flogging you could control the mind of the person underneath it, through discipline. Natalie's research indicated magistrates in Ballarat were more likely to issue floggings than other courts in Victoria, particularly for youth.
"In 1902 two youths were sentenced to 12 and six strokes for a cowardly assault upon an 'aged Chinaman'. They were held indefinitely at the Ballarat gaol until the courts could find someone willing to administer the floggings, as both warders and police refused to do it."
The youths were 11 and 15 years old.
Floggings were administered in Victorian prisons as a part of punishment until they tailed off in the 1940s. The last man to be flogged in a Victorian jail was a prisoner at Pentridge in 1958. Ironically, the last man hanged, Ronald Ryan, died at Pentridge in 1967, nine years later.
Flogging was removed from the Victorian prison statutes in 1973, years after it had disappeared in other states, including NSW and Tasmania where it was originally used more widely. It remained as a disciplinary 'tool' in our schools until 1983.
Dr Waldron paid tribute to the astonishing work done by Ms Ford in her research and writing for the gaol tours proposed for may, saying her work had not only thrown light on a penal practice not often talked about, but had led to the recovery of artefacts not seen in Ballarat before.
He says Ms Ford's book on the gaol and her studies into the practice of flogging in Ballarat show the value of historical research at Federation University, and he is looking forward to sharing her discoveries with the public for Ballarat Heritage Weekend.
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