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NLA News - home January 2005 Volume XV Number 4
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Cover of The Difficulties of My Position: The Diaries of Prison Governor John Buckley Castieau, 1855–1884, edited and introduced by Mark Finnane (National Library of Australia, 2004)

Building castles in the air’
—the Castieau diaries

Mark Finnane gives us a tantalising glimpse into the diaries of a colourful official who was acquainted with many of the notable characters of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ from the 1850s to the 1880s

Saturday 23 September 1871 was an important day for Marcus Clarke. He had been preparing a new play, an adaptation of Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for its premiere that evening. In the middle of the day he went to the Yorick Club. His next couple of hours are recorded in the diary of one he met there, John Buckley Castieau.

Castieau found Clarke ‘rather fidgety about’ his new play. ‘We chummed together and agreed to take a Turkish bath’. Castieau was a novice, but ‘Clarke was an old hand and agreed to show me the ropes’. At the Russell Street baths they paid their two shillings each and in they went.

You are shown into a narrow passage on each side of which are a number of small rooms. You enter one & strip, fastening around your loins a piece of calico about the size of the figurative fig-leaf. An attendant meets you when you are ready, locks the door of the room you have left & takes away the key. You are then marshalled to the end of the passage & admitted through a door opened for the purpose into a room which is most uncomfortably hot & even oven like. Here you find a number of individuals clad as simply as yourself standing or sitting about the room & in different degrees of perspiration.

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Supreme Court and Gaol, Melbourne c.1850s
hand col. lithograph;
7.5 x 16.5 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an8628834

And so it goes. Castieau finds himself agnostic about the bath’s effects, but ‘I shall certainly have one or two more Turkish Baths before I shall think of condemning or finding fault with them’. In the evening he attends the play, ‘amusing enough though it was made up of very slender materials’.

John Buckley Castieau was a dreamer, a drinker, an aspirant writer, a player in amateur theatre, a conversationalist, a Victorian husband and father of six children. He was also the Melbourne Gaol governor, from where he issued out daily to visit the Yorick Club, attend the theatre, stroll the city streets with his wife and children. And he was a diarist of some discipline, over long periods of time.

The Castieau diaries were donated by family descendants to the National Library about 25 years ago. Their range is impressive. In 12 volumes, dating from their first entries in 1855 during the state trials of the Eureka rebels, to the last, in 1884, only a month before his death, they provide an outstanding record of daily life in colonial Victoria during these years.

The first of the surviving diaries is the one Castieau purchased and began in January 1855. It is possible he had kept a diary before this—in a quiet moment he later reflects on some writing that he had undertaken while on board the emigrant boat that brought him with his sisters to Victoria in 1852.

Eleven of the 12 volumes are small format (‘Lett’s Diary No 8’ for most years and the ‘Australian Rough Diary No. 6’ in the last two years, 1883–1884). One volume is a foolscap size (‘Australian Rough Diary No. 4’, costing 2s. 6d in 1877)—this is the most carelessly kept of the diaries and contains entries at random dates between 1877 and 1879. Apart from these years, the remaining diaries contain the best part of a daily record for the years 1855–1857, 1870–1872, 1874 and 1883–1884.

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John Buckley Castieau
Photograph courtesy of Ian McKellar and Brian Castieau

In addition, Castieau kept the diary intermittently between 1857 and 1861, but the volume for the last of these years contains extensive notes that appear to be part of a preparation for a lecture on the Crimean War, the kind of thing he would be doing during the 1860s as a leading figure in the Beechworth Athenaeum. One other volume is still in the possession of a family member, covering part of the year 1875 and concluding with a suggestion that Castieau had decided not to continue his daily practice of diary-keeping.

Without the diaries we would know just one side of his life, from his continuous service at various levels of the Victorian Prisons Department over more than over three decades. In December 1852, shortly after his arrival at Port Phillip, he gained employment as a turnkey at the Melbourne Gaol. He was promoted to ‘senior turnkey’ within a week and then to the position of gaoler at the old Eastern Gaol in 1854. Just 23 years old then, he was still only 25 when in 1856 he was promoted to the position of governor at the new Beechworth Prison in the heart of Victoria’s north-eastern gold rush country.

Life in Melbourne was, to use a favourite Castieau word at this time, ‘fast’. For someone building a career, for a young man of his age, the temptations to indulge were considerable, the costs high, the occasions for remorse numerous.

Went to the Promenade Concert in the Evening. Saw numbers I know but am very dissatisfied with myself for being tempted there so often. It costs a great deal of money, although the admission is but a shilling, for Australian Politeness necessitates the asking of all speaking acquaintances to Nobblerise, and as Drinks cost each a shilling a Pound soon evaporates.

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Arthur J. Stopps (1833–1931)
Post Office, Beechworth c.1856
hand col. lithograph;
sheet 14.4 x 19.6 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an8628791

 

There were alternatives—amateur theatre, French lessons, dancing. Castieau was among the founding circle of the Garrick Club, which spent a good deal of time in 1855 preparing for its presentation of the comedy The Heir at Law before the Governor, Sir Charles Hotham, in November. With the youthful Dr James Neild, another member of the Garrick Club and later a formidable drama critic as well as Melbourne coroner, medical reformer and educator, Castieau organised French lessons with a M. Lefarge—another occasion for imbibing. At the first lesson, ‘we had some sherry, but the old chap said it would do very well for John Bull but recommended me strongly to get some Claret to discuss during our French Exercises’. The order comes through the following day: ‘Three dozen of Claret came ordered by our French Tutor. Newby called after four o clock & we discussed a glass or two & considered it very good’.

Alternately struggling with drink and embracing it, Castieau’s very Victorian confessions describe other areas of life in terms of waste and its opposite, productive investment. One domain is the building of a career. Here a young man in the government service had to tread warily, avoiding offence and nurturing supporters. For the most part, Castieau managed well—well enough indeed to survive an occasional wreckage on the shoals of his own weakness for drink, and end up, by 1881, as the Inspector-General of Penal Establishments.

A more personal investment was that secured through domestic settlement. His youthful debauchery is less celebrated by Castieau than regretted, a sign that he might come to no good in the end, that his aspirations to respectability would  evaporate. Taking hold of himself in 1856 he embarks on a hopeless courtship with ‘Emily’.

There is a young lady, a neat little body just my idea of a wife, sits very near my pew, but unfortunately in such a position that I have to turn round to look at her … I would speak to her but she is never alone & worse still is generally met by some demon in trousers as soon as she leaves the Church Doors.

Emily remains beyond reach. After six months Castieau declares himself in a letter. Her response is swift and confirms her suitor’s worst fears: ‘the Galling part of the note was, that my occupation was the principal objection’.

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‘Examination and Remand of [Ned] Kelly in Melbourne Gaol’ [J.B. Castieau Centre]
Reproduced from The Australian Sketcher, 14 August 1880

The bachelor was only saved by meeting his life-long partner Polly at a Beechworth church bazaar in 1858. ‘House very much improved’, records Castieau in the aftermath of their wedding just six weeks later, ‘commenced at once a domestic life.’ Domestic life brought new obligations—six children in the 10 years after 1859, all of them raised in the environs first of Beechworth Prison and later Melbourne Gaol. It seems likely that this domestic load explains the absence of diaries for most of the 1860s, a time during which Castieau was a prominent figure in Beechworth civic life, especially its Athenaeum. On his return to Melbourne he and Polly retained their links with the town. It was Castieau who negotiated in Melbourne the design and production of the stained-glass Burke Memorial Window, with its Southern Cross motif, still in place at the Beechworth Burke Museum.

This was an unusual man—every day a prison governor, overseeing the strict regimes of a nineteenth-century gaol, its punishments of flogging and hanging, but thoroughly absorbed in the life of the city around him. The city was not simply an escape—for there is much evidence that Castieau was the main source of press reporting of the Melbourne Gaol. And both he and Polly used the resources of the city to lend a hand to the indigent prisoners who passed through the revolving door of the gaol.

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Polly Castieau (née Moore)
Photograph courtesy of Ian McKellar and Brian Castieau

Neither was the domestic quarters a haven from the gaol’s grim surrounds. A family story has it that one son, Godfrey, was taken by his father to meet Ned Kelly during the latter’s imprisonment and trial in 1880. As Godfrey Cass, this son was to become a notable early Australian film director and actor, starring himself as Ned in one of his productions. Regrettably, by 1880 Castieau the elder had tired of his diary-keeping so we have no documented record of this encounter with the gaol’s most famous inmate. When he resumed a diary again in the last year or so of his life, Castieau was labouring under the burdens of an office he could no longer manage, and of a disposition, physical and mental, that made him, as he said, ‘oh so weary of the world’.

‘All my Castles in the Air are however now burst’ concluded Castieau in the aftermath of a gaol escape, using a phrase that he often uses to sum up the distance between vision and reality. His diaries are a sustained reflection on everyday life, manners and aspirations among the Victorian middle classes in nineteenth-century Australia. Not to mention the way they illuminate those gloomy spaces surrounded by the formidable gaol walls of the nineteenth-century prison.

MARK FINNANE is Professor of History at Griffith University, Queensland, where he is Dean of Graduate Studies. He is the author of five books dealing with the social history of policing, prisons and punishment, the most recent, for the National Library, entitled The Difficulties of My Position: The Diaries of Prison Governor John Buckley Castieau 1855–1884 (2004).

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