KEY POINTS:
J M. Barrie's evergreen play Peter Pan is largely acted out on a make-believe island called Neverland, peopled by redskins, pirates and lost boys.
The story of early Auckland has its lost boys, too. These were the youthful inmates of Parkhurst Prison, on England's Isle of Wight, who were transported to the settlement in 1842 and 1843.
Settlers who arrived in Auckland during its first 10 years or so have always been looked on as honoured pioneers.
In 1940, as part of the provincial centennial celebrations, a committee published a comprehensive Roll of Early Settlers and Descendants in the Auckland Province Prior to the End of 1852.
This listed most of the 552 migrants who arrived on the Jane Gifford and the Duchess of Argyle in October 1842.
But the names of the 128 Parkhurst boys, who landed shortly after, were almost wholly absent, even though at that time they made up a not insignificant element in a population that was still under 3000.
In that 1940 roll only one Parkhurst pioneer is listed with his ship, the St George, showing the correct date of arrival.
Three others are on the roll with the correct year but not the incriminating name of the ship; a further five names are listed but with a false year of arrival.
The great majority of the Parkhurst names are missing. This reticence stands in contrast to today's attitude in Australia, where there is a general readiness to recognise and sometimes accept proudly a convict ancestry.
The ages of the "boys" transported ranged from 12 to 20; the average was 17 years and 11 months.
Incorrigible offenders were never considered for entry into Parkhurst, and court records in England show most inmates were convicted for felonies such as burglary, breaking and entering, and swindling.
Nevertheless, the furore stirred up in Auckland by the arrival of these delinquents, who had, after all, served their term and were entitled to release as free citizens, was out of all proportion to their original offences.
IN 1837, English prison authorities took a step that must be regarded as unusually enlightened in an era when prisons were designed to punish and deter, not to rehabilitate.
That year it was decided to separate young offenders in prison hulks from adult convicts likely to corrupt them. Better, it was thought, to place these lads in an institution where, by teaching them a useful trade, they could be prepared for a return to society in England or the colonies.
The former military hospital at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, unused since the Napoleonic Wars and somewhat run down, seemed almost custom-built for the well-intentioned scheme.
By the time the first boys were ready to be shipped to New South Wales, once the main convict destination, settlers there were no longer prepared to accept newcomers who were not free.
This obstructiveness almost certainly lay behind the decision to redirect the boys to West Australia and to Auckland where a reported shortage of labour would, it was imagined, hush protests about the entry of young people who might otherwise have been considered undesirable.
On June 3, 1842, the barque St George left Portsmouth bearing 92 former Parkhurst prisoners, accompanied by 34 fare-paying passengers who disembarked with the boys when the vessel arrived at Auckland more than five months later.
According to the guardian who had accompanied the boys during the long voyage, their behaviour was excellent.
And at the end of the voyage, Captain Best, who had an extensive and unsentimental experience of transported convicts, wrote that he had been much impressed by the new arrivals. He saw no reason why they should not become "useful members of society ... "
But in the months ahead, Best's fellow officers would not share this first favourable impression. In this notoriously fractious colony, there was a consensus among army officers, Government officials and settlers throughout the country that sending the boys to New Zealand was an unqualified disaster.
Once the St George anchored, David Rough, immigration officer since July 1842, was instructed to act as the boys' guardian. In a time of economic depression, he had to contrive a way to absorb 35 so-called "free boys" - those who had been pardoned on arrival - into the local labour force.
He was instructed to place the other 57, who had been trained as tailors and shoemakers, for a period of indentured service with settlers prepared to take them on as "apprentices".
Well aware that the boys' trade qualifications were superfluous to the needs of pioneering Auckland, Rough wisely notified potential masters, that "all the boys have been accustomed to work on a farm".
The indenture obliged employers to provide two suits of clothing, for summer and winter, and to supply a daily ration of food. This was carefully prescribed, and included 1 pound (453g) of biscuit, or 1 pound of soft bread, 1 pound of meat (to be fresh at least four days a week) and 1 pound of potatoes or rice.
At first, few of the free boys got jobs, and Rough put them to work as road-makers. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in the winter of 1843 that the freed boy labourers in Auckland were "employed to break stones for little more than their food".
Rough's continued reports stressed the glutted labour market as the main reason settlers were reluctant to employ Parkhurst boys and the reason he recommended that the scheme be discontinued.
Contemporary newspapers reveal a different story. From the start, Auckland settlers were not disposed to give the boys the benefit of the doubt. James George, the town's first baker and an enthusiastic gossip, wrote in his memoirs that "bolts and bars was [sic] in request after they came".
Certainly, police records noted that theft increased significantly the following year. Local opinion had it that the boys engulfed the settlement in a crime wave. And any misdemeanour by the boys, any appearance by one in the police court, was always faithfully reported in the press.
But the main threat to law and order in the 1840s was not theft but drunkenness. Not surprisingly, in a frontier society that was predominantly male, single, young and included a large number of servicemen, and where a gill (or quarter-pint - about 1000ml) of spirits cost only sixpence, much alcohol was drunk.
Rough's second report as guardian in April 1843, puts the Parkhurst boys' criminality into further perspective. He established that most offences were minor, and few were against the person.
Yet anonymous contributors to the local press continued to submit hostile articles on these supposed reprobates.
"It is our duty to see that New Zealand is not turned into a bed for the seed of vice and crime," declared one correspondent. Aucklanders were in no doubt that the commonly used nickname "Parkhurst seedlings" carried no benevolent overtone, just as the alternative ironic name "Parkhurst penitents" implied the lads were not sincerely contrite.
Another anonymous contributor, probably Attorney-General William Swainson, presented the widespread fear that what had been "an experiment should become a settled practice" and would result in New Zealand becoming "the refuge for the 'juvenile delinquents' of Great Britain".
With this mounting hostility in the settlement, it is easy to understand why the arrival of the barque Mandarin on November 14, 1843, with another contingent of Parkhurst boys, whipped up a storm.
In a leader in the Southern Cross 10 days later, under the heading "The Parkhurst penitents", the editor deplored this attempt to make New Zealand one of "England's moral dunghills".
"We protest against the inhuman attempt to convert our adopted colony into a pestilential convict colony."
Aucklanders were mollified neither by the small number of boys - 31 - on the Mandarin, nor by their guardian's report that they were "exceedingly good boys" who had been "particularly industrious during the voyage".
Far from being greeted with tolerance and benevolence, the boys ran into a brick wall of prejudice.
Few settlers were prepared to give them permanent employment, despite the fact that, unlike the first batch , the Mandarin immigrants had a much more diverse range of trade skills, especially those relating to building, such as carpentry and bricklaying, Maori seem to have been far readier than their Pakeha counterparts to let the Parkhurst immigrants settle in their midst.
Felton Mathew, the censorious chief police magistrate, reported in November 1843 that "many of these boys ... have been living almost wholly among the natives". This, he said, was "a kind of intercourse", as he termed it, likely to lead to mischief. History has proved him mistaken. Some highly regarded Maori families today bear Parkhurst surnames.
By the end of 1844, the boys tended to fall into one of two categories. The first was those who had unobtrusively settled and, in Rough's phrase, were "well established"; the second was young men of a non-conforming kind, who had tended to move away from Auckland where people, justly or not, had rejected them.
"This class of boy", wrote Mathew, "is now, however, very much dispersed, many of them are gone to other parts of the colony and several have left the country, either for the Australian colonies, Tahiti or some other of the islands in these seas."
With this scattering of some, and the submergence into anonymity of the remainder, the Parkhurst immigrants had indeed become Auckland's lost boys.
The issue flared up again in 1849 when the Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey, proposed that ticket-of-leave men (probationers) from Australia should be introduced into New Zealand as a step towards their ultimate rehabilitation.
Auckland settlers, who had already had a taste of ex-convicts from Tasmania living in their midst, were immediately up in arms Twelve prominent citizens convened a meeting of protest in the Exchange Hotel in Shortland St. There it was resolved that after having "already been subjected to an experiment with the Parkhurst boys" they would "never consent to sacrifice the character of their adopted country ... by voluntarily admitting among them those with a conviction". The proposal did not go ahead.
The settlers' rejection of Earl Grey's scheme has value for an Auckland historian, revealing as it does the underlying reason the Parkhurst scheme broke down five years before - the fear that Britain was about to introduce convicts into New Zealand.
At the time, the British Government's decision not to persevere with the Parkhurst scheme after 1844 was attributed to the lack of work available and the boys' alleged lawlessness.
But behind the reluctance of the Auckland settlers to give the boys the benefit of the doubt was the secret fear that they were the thin edge of the wedge for the entry of full-fledged convicts.
New Zealand in 1840 was the only British colony in the Southern Hemisphere without convict labour. On the eve of the annexation of New Zealand, the Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Normanby, instructed Hobson as the governor-elect that even though the new colony was temporarily to be an extension of New South Wales, the policy of the British Government was that it should remain convict-free.
In The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson famously declared his aim of rescuing the victims of lost causes in the past from what he called "the enormous condescension of posterity". Has Auckland subjected the Parkhurst boys to its condescension, treated them as an inconvenient piece of the past to be swept under the historical carpet? In the 21st century we at last have the opportunity of finding our lost boys again, of posthumously giving them the rehabilitation the city denied them 160 years ago.
* Logan Campbell's Auckland by R.J.C. Stone, published by Auckland University Press. Recommended price $45.
