The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce

Hopscotch 2008

R4 DVD

The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce is a historical re-enactment of a very dark chapter in Australian and Irish history. While it could have easily been sensationalized, instead it has been carefully directed to highlight the shocking conditions that existed in the Australian penal colonies of the period. Rather than showing Pearce as a monster, it shows him as a product of a system that literally turned him savage.

Alexander Pearce was an Irish farm labourer who was convicted of theft and shipped to what was then the Van Diemen’s land penal colony. After repeated thefts while in the Van Diemen’s penal colony, he is sent to the notorious Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour.

Sarah Island was considered the most isolated prison in the world; it did not require bars or walls as it was bordered by oceans and rainforest. However, Pearce was so brutalized that he decided he had nothing more to lose and escape with some seven other prisoners.

The eight-man escape party was led by the volatile and unstable English sailor named Robert Greenhill, believing that another settlement is just “over the hill” they begin a trek which soon becomes a disaster. Starving and suffering from the elements, they resorted to cannibalism. Slowly, one by one, the whole party, except Pearce is eaten, Pearce makes it to Jericho but when brought to trial nobody believes his story.

The authorities simply cannot accept that anyone could have made it across the wilderness, especially considering it is a three months journey. Pearce is returned to Sarah Island. Here he is mercilessly whipped and tortured, reduced to a near animal state, he escapes with a younger man, Cox. However, when he finds Cox cannot swim and hence he cannot make good his escape, he kills and eats Cox and is captured, put on trial and found guilty of murder and cannibalism.

The power of this film is its authenticity. Based on original transcripts of Pearce’s confession, it is a stinging indictment of the violence of the penal system of the period. It is a powerful film which juxtaposes the beauty of the Australian landscape with the sheer cruelty of the penal system and those who have been brutalized by it.

While the film makes no excuses for the barbarity and violence of Pearce and his fellow prisoners, nor for their cannibalism, it does not seek to sensationalize it either, but works to show it in the context of the penal system of the period and to the way in which the Irish were demonized by the English and treated accordingly.

I think the most poignant comment made in the film comes when Pearce is explaining to his confessor what occurred and states “No man can tell what he will do when driven by hunger”. It is a very true observation which relates as much to the Irish sent to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread to Pearce’s cannibalism. In a more humane system, perhaps much of the whole cycle of violence and suffering could have been avoided.

This review will appear in Volume 2:1 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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