The Prison Hulk Success, one of a number of makeshift jails moored off Point Gellibrand. Credit:State Library of Victoria When word spread in the 1850s that gold was for the picking, crime in Victoria grew in proportion to the streams of hopeless romantics and the desperate who came by ship and foot to seek the treasure. Horse thieves, carpetbaggers, gunslingers, petty criminals driven by hunger and poverty, flash coves and painted ladies, swindlers and chancers of all types rolled in. Bushranging, practised largely by ex-convicts attracted to the ease of plucking gold without mining it, became popular. Melbourne Gaol was soon overwhelmed. Part of the overflow went to a stockade at Pentridge – as Coburg was then named – during the early 1850s. There prisoners were housed in huts on wheels, slept on wooden benches, worked in heavy chains breaking rock and building roads and were forced to eat standing outside in all weather. Many were regularly flogged and half starved. Mounted native (Indigenous) police guarded them.

The middle deck on Prison Hulk Success. Credit:State Library of Victoria And then came the floating hulks. Port Arthur, Macquarie Harbour and Norfolk Island are the places we remember as the marquee addresses of torture in Australia's early days. The officer's quarters of the Prison Hulk Success. Credit:State Library of Victoria But Melbourne was about to challenge them.

The first Pentridge boss, Inspector-General of Victoria's Penal Establishments, was a magistrate named Samuel Barrow. The Success later toured the world with an exaggerated re-enactment of the horrific conditions convicts faced. Credit:State Library of Victoria The men knew what awaited them aboard – the ringbolt, gag and bludgeon … Death to them was an escape from misery. Henry Garrett, prisoner Barrow had already earned his reputation in the most brutal of all prisons: Norfolk Island. He had arrived on that godforsaken island in late 1845. There, he created new offences, brought in ex-convict "constables" to drive the prisoners to madness and ordered floggings so savage convicts routinely had their backbones exposed. Barrow was a sadist who ordered men hung for hours by their thumbs, spreadeagled them with chains and, according to Robert Macklin's book Dark Paradise, was fond of the tube gag – a wooden cylinder thrust into a prisoner's mouth and held in place by straps to restrict breathing.

The prisoners, finally, would take no more when Barrow had their personal cooking and eating utensils confiscated – their only possessions. This bastardry, approved by the weak commandant, Joseph Childs, provoked a mutiny. An overseer and three constables were killed. Though a convict known as Jacky-Jacky Westwood, the "gentleman bushranger", confessed he had killed all four, Barrow ordered 26 convicts to be tried. Twelve of them were found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang. By then, a new commandant had turned up. John Giles Price came from Van Diemen's Land and proved to be at least as pitiless as the magistrate Barrow.

Price's first job was to oversee the trial and supervise the hangings. All convicts were required to watch as the 12 men were hanged in two groups of six. Within three weeks, Price oversaw five more hangings. His was a reign of terror, where the scourging never stopped. Catholic Bishop Robert Willson of the Hobart diocese visited the island in 1852 and described the yard, wet "from the blood running down men's backs, mingled with the water used in washing them when taken down from the triangle – the degrading scene of a large number of men … waiting their turn to be tortured, and the more humiliating spectacle presented by those who had undergone the scourging". Once, when prisoners didn't stop speaking after the night bell, Price had all in the hut flogged, 100 lashes each, according to James Morton in his book Maximum Security. Price left the island in 1853. In 1854, however, he turned up in Melbourne as the new Inspector-General of Penal Establishments, taking over from Barrow, his old fellow torturer from Norfolk Island. By then, Barrow had expanded his enjoyment of torment beyond Pentridge to a new purgatory: the hulks of Hobsons Bay.

The government had begun buying ships to house prisoners. Several of these ships had been abandoned off Williamstown by their crews, who had absconded to the goldfields. Five hulks fitted out with cells were moored off Point Gellibrand at Williamstown – a spot which today enjoys a sublime view of the Melbourne city skyline across Hobsons Bay. There was nothing sublime for the hulks' inhabitants. The hulks Success and President were punishment prisons, the Sacramento housed prisoners who were taken on land to break rock (and later became a women's prison), the Deborah was used for insubordinate seamen, and the Lysander was occupied by Indigenous people. In the 1860s, the Success became a "reformatory" for wayward boys until the authorities, scandalised by the night-time behaviour of loveless small boys seeking comfort, removed them all. In an official report in 1852, Barrow declared he wanted the experience of the hulks to forge a "wholesome terror in the minds of prisoners".

Morton's Maximum Security relates that Barrow personally wrote the regulations for the most feared of the hulks, the President, which was for "intractable" prisoners. Those unfortunates would be kept locked in irons weighing between five and 16 kilograms for the entire period of their confinements of 12 months to three years. Prisoners would be cut off "from all communication with their fellow creatures and from all chance of escape by a rigid and strict system of separate confinement". Sentences could start all over again for "want of cleanliness, insolence, riotous or disorderly conduct or attempting to hold communication with a fellow prisoner". Lower deck cells were five feet below the waterline, each with a single meshed window two feet above the water. In rough weather, water washed in, making sleep impossible.

One of the prisoners, bank robber Henry Garrett, wrote of the punishment regime. "Along the seawalls of the cells about 3ft from the floor was a row of massive ringbolts. To these men were handcuffed with their hands behind their backs ... the time for punishment varied from one day to a week and to reply [speak] while on this ringbolt was to ensure bludgeoning and gagging often into sensibility and beyond it." Prisoners could get a copy of the Bible, but, wrote Barrow, "prison is not for amusement or entertainment as afforded by books of ordinary reading – but to suffer". This, then, was the hell off the shore of Williamstown that was handed from Barrow to Price, who clearly approved. When Giles was upbraided by magistrate Crawford Pasco for allowing a prisoner to be badly beaten, Price was unperturbed. "The prisoner has several bruises about the body," he admitted airily, "But he has not received more punishment than he richly deserved." The bushranger Francis McNeish McNeil McCallum, known as Captain Melville, was to discover that torture was sanctioned. Driven to fury on one of the hulks, he tried to bite off the nose of a warder. He was beaten into submission and left in shortened chains so he couldn't lie down for two days and nights. He spent another 18 days in dark, solitary confinement deep in the hulk.

Later, Captain Melville and nine men tried to escape the Success. A warder was killed by a hammer blow, a seaman drowned, two convicts were shot and one died, probably drowned. Melville was charged as ringleader. He was sentenced to death, but his evidence of brutality aboard the hulks gained him a reprieve. He was later found dead in his cell at Melbourne's central gaol, a large handkerchief around his neck. The verdict? Suicide. Of course. Fate was to have its way with both Samuel Barrow and John Giles Price. Barrow drowned while boating on Port Phillip Bay on May 5, 1854. Price met a more gruesome end. When visiting Point Gellibrand to hear the complaints of prisoners about the inedible bread they were issued, Price was set upon. Clods of dirt were thrown, then large stones, then he was attacked with shovels and picks. He died next day. The prisoner/author Garrett wrote later that Price's fate was decided before he turned up. "Several of the men knew what awaited them aboard – the ringbolt, gag and bludgeon … Death was preference ... death to them was an escape from misery."

Seven prisoners got their wish at the end of the hangman's rope in April, 1857. Brutality had created brutes willing to kill and die for it. Most of the hulks were broken up by 1885. And who benefited? The Success was sailed away by dodgy entrepreneurs who made big money exhibiting her around the world, tricked up with tall tales about how she was the oldest ship afloat (she wasn't), how she had transported convicts to the colonies (she hadn't) and with breathless stories of the Kelly gang, who were never aboard. The truth would have been enough. One of the on-board guides, the bushranger Harry Power, could have told the gawkers that. He'd been a prisoner on the hulk. Perhaps, in accepting a job on the Success showboat, he had contracted Stockholm Syndrome.

The Success hoax went on until an arsonist burnt her to the waterline in Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1946. And Melbourne conveniently forgot the horror of the hulks of Hobsons Bay.