JOHN GILES PRICE
EVIL COMMANDANT OF NORFOLK SLAND
Today, Norfolk Island is a beautiful place with only a small population. To keep the island clean and unspoiled, the number of tourists is restricted.
In 1846, nobody wanted to go there. It was a prison for Australia’s toughest convicts, the ones no other prison could break. The idea was that Norfolk Island would break them. It was in that year that Norfolk Island penal colony got the perfect Commandant.
John Giles Price looked like a kindly vicar. He was the sort of man you could imagine having a cup of tea at the church bazaar, chatting with old ladies about their gardens.
However, if you were a convict, you would find out very quickly that you were wrong. Horribly wrong. John Price was a sadist, a person who enjoyed giving pain. He loved his job because it gave him huge power over others. It was said that even his wife and five children were terrified of him.
Flogging was a normal punishment in penal colonies. Sometimes those who did the flogging were convicts themselves. But John Price made sure that his floggers had training. He wanted to make sure that being whipped wasn’t just something you had to put up with. You had to be terrified that it might happen to you. Convicts who had been beaten couldn’t clean their wounds. Flies and maggots crawled all over them. And you could be flogged for anything. Talking back to a guard. Complaining. Helping a friend. Anything. Commandant Price wasn’t fussy.
There were other punishments, of course. In one case, Price punished two men by putting extra time on their sentences. Their crime? One of them had shared food with the other. Prisoners were chained, beaten and gagged. One man who was in the hospital was chained to the floor for weeks because he had climbed to the window for fresh air.
In 1853, after several years of enjoying himself on Norfolk Island, John Price retired to a farm in Tasmania. If he’d stayed there, he might have lived to a ripe old age. But soon afterwards, he was offered a job as Inspector-General of prisons in Victoria and simply couldn’t resist it. He accepted.
In 1857, he was at the prison hulks in Williamstown, Victoria. The hulks were ships used as cells. Prisoners went from there to work at the quarries nearby, but the cells were also useful to chain up convicts. You couldn’t sit or stand properly in them and you might also be gagged. If you had a gag in your mouth, of course, you couldn’t eat, which didn’t stop the guards from throwing in bread and then taking it away, commenting that you obviously weren’t hungry. When one convict protested about this to Price, the commandant ordered that the punishment should continue.
Finally, the convicts couldn’t take it any more. They knew they would die for what they were going to do, but it seemed worth the price. One afternoon, when he was out in the quarries, the men attacked, trying to drag him to a tent made of bits of dismantled ship. There they had prepared a noose with which to hang him.
John Price was a strong man. He managed to break away from them and run. However, there were a hundred men around that quarry. As he tried to avoid the different gangs, someone managed to hit him with a heavy stone, knocking him over. After that, he was finished. The convicts hit him with anything they had in their hands at the time – hammers, stones, crowbars. There wasn’t much left of him by the time they were finished, but he survived for another day before finally dying.
That was the end of John Giles Price. He had showed that you don’t have to be on the wrong side of the law to be evil. Still, his memory lives on as the villain in Marcus Clarke’s convict novel, For The Term Of His Natural Life.
DID YOU KNOW…?
Having a security system in your home isn’t always much help, as some Melbourne gangsters found. When Alphonse Gangitano was murdered at home in 1998, the tape on his security camera was simply stolen. Charlie Hegyalji didn’t have a tape in his camera at all. His home’s front sensor light was broken on the night he was killed on his own doormat. The tall trees he had planted to make sure the police couldn’t watch him made great cover for the killer.