116 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



Port Phillip by the expatriated passengers of the Calcutta in 1803, 

 the particulars of which have already been recorded, gave to 

 Fawkner the distinction of an actual resident in the district to 

 which all Tasmania was now eagerly looking. It is true that the 

 experience gained by a lad of eleven under such eminently un- 

 favourable circumstances could not count for much a generation 

 later; but he enjoyed such distinction as pertained to the single 

 representative who had been there and fain would go again. 

 Although the . father of Fawkner had been duly convicted, he 

 does not appear to have belonged to the recognised criminal 

 classes ; for he seems to have settled down as soon as he obtained 

 his conditional pardon to industrious courses in Tasmania, and ac- 

 quired a sufficient property to enable him to pass the evening of 

 his life in respectable ease with a modest competency. But while 

 the old man, aided in his efforts, no doubt, by the self-sacrifice of 

 a devoted wife who had shared his exile, was doing his best to 

 make up his leeway, the son, exposed at an impressionable age to 

 all the unwholesome surroundings of a convict ship and a penal 

 colony, had his crop of wild oats to sow, and a congenial soil to 

 bring them to rank luxuriance. It is hardly to be wondered at 

 that the nature of his associations gave him a savage enmity to- 

 wards the official classes, whose petty tyrannies and domineering 

 control over all outside their own circle were doubtless canvassed 

 and denounced in many a conference of seditious plotters. For 

 some ten years or so Fawkner seems to have led a restless, vagrant 

 life, and during a portion of this time he was working in the bush 

 as a sawyer, but early in 1814 he fell into the hands of the 

 authorities. He took some active part in assisting a party of 

 Portuguese prisoners to escape in a boat, was betrayed, caught, and, 

 according to his own statement, deported to Sydney. Three years 

 later we find him back in the neighbourhood of Hobart Town, 

 where he had a small farm adjoining one worked by his father. 

 He did not succeed in making this primitive form of occupancy 

 profitable ; probably he did not put much of his energy into so 

 prosaic a task. This seems to be indicated by the fact that in the 

 Gazette notice in December, 1819, announcing the sale of his farm 

 by order of the mortgagee, the area is described as ninety-three 



