John Giles Price
Civil Commandant of Norfolk Island · 1808–1857
Who is John Giles Price?
John Giles Price was a British-born colonial administrator who served as the sole civilian commandant of Norfolk Island's second penal settlement, ruling the harshest secondary-punishment station in the Australian colonies from August 1846 to January 1853. Born in Cornwall to a once-wealthy but by then financially ruined baronet's family, he was educated at Charterhouse and Brasenose College, Oxford, before emigrating to Van Diemen's Land in 1836, where he farmed and married into the family of Governor Sir John Franklin. Appointed muster master of convicts and later commandant of Norfolk Island, Price built a reputation for an uncompromising, punishment-first regime, imposing severe and inventive corporal punishments for even minor breaches of discipline and openly dismissing convict claims of reform as hypocrisy. Contemporary and later historians described his rule as government by terror, informers, and the lash. Price went on to become Inspector-General of penal establishments in the colony of Victoria, where on 26 March 1857 he was attacked and fatally beaten by a group of convicts at Williamstown during a visit to hear their grievances, dying the following day. His life and Norfolk Island command later inspired the brutal commandant character Maurice Frere in Marcus Clarke's novel His Natural Life.
Sources: Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Price, John Giles (1808-1857)" · Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (1986) · Wikipedia, "John Giles Price"