almanack, which the artist had intended to be a representation of Shakspeare's arrest by Sir Thomas Lucy's gamekeepers, was "a picture of bushrangers."
To all outward appearance nothing is more probable than that a large number of convicts should escape at any moment. The convict depôts in the country districts are so unprotected that there seems no reason why the men should not walk away, without even the preliminary of knocking down a warder. Still more incapable than the depôt warder of retaining his so-called prisoners in custody does the officer in charge of a road party at first sight appear. His position, to the eye of a stranger, would present that of one who was abandoned to the mercy of sixteen or twenty desperate men, beyond sight or sound of aid except the chance passing of a teamster, whose own antecedents would probably be similar to those of the wayside gang. The truth is, that the detention of the prisoners, and consequently the safety of the free community in Western Australia, has depended mainly on the impassable and inhospitable character of the bush, which serves the purpose of a vast wall around a natural jail the inmates of which, as a policeman once said to us, "may escape from the prison, but cannot get out of the prison yard."
As a body the prisoners have sense enough to know that a certain amount of restraint upon their liberty is better for them than to become complete outlaws by attempting acts of violence, with the alternative of the gallows if captured, or a death by hunger and thirst in the bush if free. Nevertheless, as surely as winter filled the water holes, we used to hear of escapes from the road parties.
