“Even 25 lashes (known as a tester . . . ) was a draconic torture, able to skin a man’s back and leave it a tangled web of criss-crossed knotted scars. . . .

The scarred back became an emblem of rank. So did silence. Convicts called a man who blubbered and screamed at the triangles a crawler or a sandstone. (Sandstone is a common rock around Sydney; it is soft and crumbles easily.) By contrast, the convict who stood up to it in silence was admired as a pebble or an iron man. He would show his shapes (strip for punishment) with disdain, and after the domino (last lash) he would spit at the feet of the man who gave him his red shirt. There were always more sandstones than pebbles.”

—Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.