The Difficulties of My Position

A career in the Victorian penal system might not seem to be a source of excitement, but for John Buckley Castieau it was the trigger for nearly three decades of of diaries that reveal far more about the colonya s early social history than what went on behind prison walls. J.B. Castieau was the governor of Beechworth Gaol and, later, Melbourne Gaol at the time of Ned Kellya s execution. He was also briefly and somewhat disastrously, the Inspector-General of Penal Establishments for Victoria. Well-educated, frequently in debt, impulsively generous, self-doubting and of a unsteady habitsa in his cups, he knew many of the prominent characters of a Marvellous Melbournea including the journalist Marcus Clark and the famous and fiery legal figure Sir Redmond Barry.