The Lace Balcony by Johanna Nicholls Page A

River periodically flooded the penal settlement – and living in hell was a full-time occupation.
    It had taken him no more than the first week of his four-year sentence to understand that he had entered a new time zone divorced from the world he had known.
    Under his alias of Sean O’Connor, Mungo realised his every waking hour was governed by Moreton Bay Time, an endless procession of bleak, cruel, hungry days and nights chained together as irrevocably as the iron shackles binding his ankles. Time was rigidly marked by the sound of the triangle which demarcated every aspect of their day. Rising at dawn, they were assigned to back-breaking work until breakfast and the sketchy cleansing of their bodies. Relentless slogging work in the tropical sun followed until midday meal break. After working until sundown, they were locked up in darkness until sun up.
    Only Sundays, with its forced attendance at religious services, brought any respite, except for those occasions when prisoners were called to witness the regular pattern of floggings ordered by Commandant Logan in his self-appointed dual role as Magistrate. Even misdemeanours such as insubordination or the inability to work could earn them twenty-five to three hundred cuts of ‘the cat’ despite the legal maximum of fifty set by the Governor. Bolters who escaped into the bush had little choice – die of starvation, throw in their lot with some Aboriginal tribe or return to face a merciless flogging.
    Mungo soon recognised that his five hundred-odd fellow prisoners were governed by three sets of laws. The first, British law, was the birth right (theoretically) of all British citizens. The second was British law as practised in New South Wales – open to interpretation and abuse according to the ‘special conditions’ of a penal colony. The third was Logan’s Law – enforced at Moreton Bay by a tyrant. TheCommandant had been given a firm set of rigid but humane guidelines limiting his powers of punishment, but in practice, the remote prison being five hundred miles north of Sydney Town, the Governor’s residence and convict authorities, Logan’s Law entailed the systematic flouting of British law and was a byword for extreme cruelty.
    Yet Mungo’s first impression of Moreton Bay, and the one he clung to in his darkest hours, was a vision of sheer majestic tropical beauty.
    It’s so damned breathtaking it’s enough to make an atheist fall on his knees and believe in God the Creator.
    The lush profusion of giant eucalypts, palms, acacias, and rare specimens just waiting to be named by botanists, the hot golds, oranges, reds and purples of tropical flowering shrubs, all seemed to beckon him as seductively as any woman. Mungo could almost hear the voice of the bush whispering . . . Come to me, I’m here, waiting for you.
    Since his arrival, Mungo had received more than one ‘red shirt’; in his case these were punishments for insubordination, daring to answer back to his overseer. These floggings of two hundred or more lashes were Logan’s so-called deterrents, each cut of the cat delivered with relish by the scourger. Mungo had survived them without crying out in pain, though his lips were bloody with the effort.
    Today was a merciful period of respite for Mungo’s back, which was beginning to heal. Logan was away on one of his self-appointed explorations, exploring dense bushland, climbing impregnable cliff faces, charting and naming rivers and mountains. These daring journeys were said to be both Logan’s bid for glory and avoidance of official correspondence with Governor Darling.
    Aware only that he had been ordered to the muster for inspection, Mungo followed behind a stumbling, ironed procession of prisoners on the orders of an officer who despite the heat and his faded red coatee seemed unusually spruced up.
    Mungo turned to Stimson, the prisoner next in line. ‘If we have to