Chapter 4
Colony Going Places (With Some Teething Troubles)
In This Chapter
Watching a settlement go from surviving to thriving under the care of the NSW Corps
Encountering convict entrepreneurs, officer traders and raucous living with Governor Hunter
Introducing reforms with Governor King
Rebelling against Governor Bligh
Australia, originally planned to serve multiple purposes, ended up being solely a prison dump for convicts (refer to Chapter 3). At the same time as the new colony was settled, Britain became seriously distracted by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Britain, fighting off invasion threats and struggling for world domination, wasn’t massively concerned with what the penal dump on the other side of the world was doing.
Facing failing crops and a huge wait between resupply ships, life for arrivals on the First and Second Fleets — convict and soldier alike — was pretty grim. Yet, within 20 years of settlement, many of those who’d been sent out here in exile were making fortunes, and were making a life much freer and in most ways better than they could ever have hoped of getting in Britain.
In this chapter, I cover the way officers of the NSW Corps stepped into the vacuum left by Britain’s lack of real planning or ongoing involvement in the development of the economic life of NSW. From 1792, resourceful officers from this permanent regiment of soldiers started using government money — and rum, that other great motivator — to expand cultivation and settlement, and established a cartel on incoming trade, making themselves seriously wealthy in the process. I also look at how their monopoly was short-lived — convict men and women who the officers originally set up to handle the retail side of things pretty quickly cut in on their turf.
I also cover the governors sent to wrest power out of the hands of the NSW Corps and various ex-convict traders — governors Hunter, King and Bligh.
Rising to the Task: The NSW Corps Steps Up
Under Captain Phillip’s rule, little land was cleared and few crops grown. The convicts were practically impossible to extract labour from, and remained listless and idle on the government farms (refer to Chapter 3 for more on this). After Phillip left the colony at the end of 1792 due to ill health, for the next three years the colony was administered by the head of the NSW Corps: Major Francis Grose and then Major William Paterson.
The NSW Corps was a permanent regiment of the British army and had been sent out to relieve the Marines sent with the First Fleet. The officers of this Corps, which became known as the Rum Corps, set up trading monopolies, increasing (at hugely inflated prices) the amount of goods available in the settlement. They also found a way to convince the convicts to do some work — through paying them in rum.
Under the administration of the Corps, Sydney thrived. The settlement became a shanty metropolis doing a roaring trade in imported goods, expanding trade in the Pacific — sandalwood and pork from Tahiti found a particularly ready market — and exploring newly opened sealing and whaling grounds. And convicts and ex-convicts by and large thrived too.
One of the great surprises of this period of Australia’s history is what happened to the convicts themselves — transportation, before it became greatly systematised, gave them a chance to step out of the vicious poverty cycle that many of the urbanised lower orders were doomed to in Britain. In the early years of the new colony, the emphasis was never on punishment or misery. Men and women were frequently given freedom before their terms expired, chiefly as a money-saving measure — if they had the talent or skill to earn their own living, then make them free as soon as possible and get them off the government store and ration books.
Setting up trading monopolies
When planning the new colony in NSW, the British Government had completely failed to provide it with any coinage or currency, expecting (vaguely) that after a year everyone would be self-sufficient, with the convicts growing enough to meet everyone’s needs.
When this failed to happen, ship captains realised that they had a wonderful captive market in NSW — an isolated outpost dependent on imports to survive. They started arriving with much needed goods but charging prohibitively extortionate prices. The officers in the NSW Corps, paid in British pounds sterling, were the only ones who could bargain the ships’ captains down, purchasing an entire ship’s consignment at reduced prices. So they did, but then started charging their own extortionate prices through their convict and common soldier middlemen.
What had originally begun as a meeting of opportunity and necessity, quickly turned into a trade monopoly.
Although it was widely accepted as common military officer practice at the time — take an overseas posting, go overseas, do everything you can to get rich — officers of the NSW Corps still couldn’t be seen directly involving themselves in trade. So they set up their convict servants (or convict mistresses) as retail frontmen (or women) for their retail operations.
The ascendancy of the ‘Rum Corps’
As head of the NSW Corps, Major Grose started giving land grants to officers, and to emancipists (the ex-convicts) and the few free settlers who were turning up here and there. Suddenly, the gears of the colony shifted. Not only did the new farmers start clearing and growing and reaping and rearing with new energy, but the convict labourers who were assigned to them were also launching themselves into the task with gusto.
In the first few years of settlement, the convict settlers weren’t remotely interested in being settlers or farmers. However, the NSW Corps (who, as new landholders, now had a vested interest in getting the convicts to work the land) found a way to unlock an incredible capacity for productivity. It turned out all they needed was the right incentive. The convicts were already being fed and provisioned with clothes and basic necessities. What more could they want for? The answer, of course, was alcohol. And for the more sophisticated, gambling and alcohol. The NSW Corps (which, for obvious reasons, quickly became known as the Rum Corps) provided these and the colony started to thrive.
Suddenly convicts were working incredibly hard, often putting in overtime to get tasks done. Not having had much chance to get alcohol since they’d left London, now they went after it with a zest that was almost awe-inspiring. One observer who saw it (David Collins, the future founding governor of Van Diemen’s Land) said that ‘the passion for liquor was so predominant among the people that it operated like a mania’.
Grose reported back to London, professing great wonderment: ‘Whether their efforts result from the novelty of the business, or the advantages they promise themselves, I cannot say, but their exertions are really astonishing’. What Grose neglected to mention, of course, was the crucial and illicit trigger for this explosion of activity.
The convicts kept coming from Britain, so the NSW Corps officers also had a great number of convicts to use. Grose and the Inspector of Public Works, John Macarthur, ensured that the officers were given about ten convicts each. The Home Office wrote to Grose, specifically instructing him that the government would pay for only two convicts per officer for a period of two years, adding that spirits not be sold to convicts (word had started getting back). But the convicts would drink, and alcohol was one of the biggest motivators that had been found to get them to work. So Grose completely ignored these instructions. And a certain degree of chaotic and riotous abandonment ensured.
With proper order and proper morality largely ignored in favour of what you could call a culture of highly productive alcoholism, the colony was no longer an economic basket case, limping along at or below subsistence level. The colony had taken off like a rocket, and was starting to make a lot of people a lot of money very quickly — but not everyone was happy with the trajectory of the rocket.
Upsetting the reverends
Word was beginning to get back to London: NSW was no place of punishment, and was out of control, said the alarmed reports. Many of the reports were written by furious evangelicals — religious Anglican ministers (such as Reverend Johnson and Reverend Samuel Marsden) who had arrived in the colony expecting to be respected as pillars of the establishment order, only to find themselves largely ignored by the convicts, and by the common soldiers and the officer corps as well.
Early NSW was anything but pious. Neither the convicts, nor the common soldiery, nor many of the officers, military or civil, set any real store on forswearing their preferred pursuits — swearing, gambling, drinking and fornicating. In this they were broadly reflective of the habits and pursuits of the bulk of Georgian England, but in NSW the established authorities and arbiters of proper morality held far less sway.
The Evangelicals were just launching their great moral revival at this time in late Georgian Britain; its chief exponent, William Wilberforce, experienced his ‘conversion’ at about the same time as the First Fleet was sailing. The Evangelists’ deep sense was that England had ‘fallen’ from the state of religious zeal of the previous century, and been seduced and corrupted by the luxuries and excesses which modern life offered. They wanted to ‘reclaim’ modern Britain from the various excesses and debaucheries that the 18th century had become famous for. The Evangelicals had some really positive social reform to their credit — most notably, the abolition of slavery in Britain — but they had their work cut out for them in the new colony of NSW.
Under the tutelage, direct and indirect, of Wilberforce, who was a friend of Prime Minister William Pitt and Sir Joseph Banks (a lot more about Banks in Chapter 3), clergymen of evangelical bent were sent out to the new settlement.
Once in NSW, Reverend Johnson railed against the laxness of the Corps when it came to enforcing piety, and for allowing convicts to throw ‘aside all regard or reverence for the Sabbath Day, and to render all public solemn worship utterly contemptible’. Convicts were paid to work on Sundays. Other convicts were left to pretty much do whatever they wanted.
While Johnson was conducting services, he claimed the bulk of convicts ‘were either asleep in their hammocks or sitting in their huts, or otherwise gone out to work for officers or other individuals’. Just as bad, ‘spiritous liquor was the most general article and mode of payment for such extra labour, and hence in the evening the whole camp has been nothing else, often, but a scene of intoxication, riots, disturbances, etc’. Evangelical missionaries escaping from threatened violence in Tahiti in 1799, according to Johnson, found in the colony of NSW ‘Adultery, Fornication, Theft, Drunkenness, Extortion, Violence and Uncleanness of every kind’.
These expressions of horror and outrage were generally applied by Evangelicals to the various ‘unclaimed’ parts of England itself — whether it was the ‘debased’ aristocrats or the ‘lower orders’ then chiefly congregating in London. Yes, the people in NSW liked to whore, gamble, swear and drink, often to excess — but that didn’t mark them out as particularly different from a lot of people in the Georgian era.
Ruling with Goodhearted Incompetence: Governor Hunter
The evangelical reverends in NSW were aghast at the lack of morality in the new colony, and all this righteous anger was reported back to William Wilberforce, who was the chief exponent of the Evangelical movement. The reports soon spread, with the Duke of Portland in Whitehall claiming, ‘Great evils have arisen from the unrestrained importation of spiritous liquors into our said settlement . . . whereby both the settlers and convicts have been induced to barter and exchange their live stock and other necessary articles for the said spirits to their particular loss and detriment.’ In response, the next governor, John Hunter, arrived in NSW in 1795 with clear instructions from the Duke: Clean the place up.
Yet on his arrival in the settlement, Hunter — himself a deeply religious Christian and sympathetic to the Evangelicals — raved about the place. Having been in NSW with Governor Phillip at the beginning of white settlement, he was staggered that so much progress had been made in so little time.
Hunter wrote to the Duke of Portland in London describing the ‘very great success’ that individual farmers had had in growing grain and breeding livestock. True, Hunter conceded a little reluctantly, it was self-interest rather than the public good that motivated everyone. Yet ‘it certainly succeeds better with them than in the hands of Government’. And he also approved of the rum incentive payments — initially, at least. ‘Much work will be done by labourers, artificers and others for a small reward in this article, and (without any injury to health) which money could not purchase.’
But Hunter was pretty lazy when it came to governing this newly productive colony. During his time as governor, Hunter failed to
Manage the emerging trade and import market in the new colony
Ensure the newly established Government store was restocked after initial supplies sold out
Control the distribution of land according to a well thought out plan — or any plan
However, Hunter’s lack of attention to detail actually had some positive effects for the colony.
Ending the trading monopoly game
When the administration of the new colony was in the hands of the NSW Corps, the officers in the Corps set up trading monopolies over all imported goods. On his arrival, Hunter made no attempt to control or manage the emerging trade, and issued no rulings on whether the monopolies should be broken or maintained.
However, failing to control trade actually had the positive effect of allowing the market to open up. The monopoly was broken not by a governor, nor an order issued from London, but by convicts and common soldiers made good — convicts and soldiers put in place, moreover, by the officers themselves.
Because the officers prized so highly their status as ‘gentlemen’, they couldn’t be seen to be involved in trade, so they put their underlings and go-betweens in the cockpit. Convict servants and soldier privates didn’t take long to corner the market for themselves, quickly proving they were more than savvy enough to strike their own deals with ships’ captains once they’d built up enough capital to do so. They and newly arrived entrepreneurs from British India undercut the officers — who were furious, but couldn’t do much about it. (They’d started falling out amongst themselves by this stage, anyway.) The NSW Corps officers started getting out of the trading game, including the grog trade, and concentrated instead on developing their landed holdings.
The rum monopoly was over. Yet no-one had told the powerful men in England that.
A government store with empty shelves
Skyrocketing inflation caused by the officers’ monopoly on imported goods (see preceding section) could have been mediated when Hunter established a government store, which provided farmers and others with reasonable prices for essential items ordered in from Britain, such as clothes, spirits, tea, tobacco and sugar.
But once the store ran out of its initial supplies Hunter neglected to re-stock. Being unable to foresee that you’d need to order regular consignments of merchandise that were being widely used by the mass of the rural population is a telling failure.
Handing out land higgledy-piggledy
Phillip, who didn’t think much of convicts as settlers, had fairly strictly separated the areas where convicts, ex-convicts and free settlers would be given land to settle, and Grose and Paterson (as heads of the NSW Corps) had largely followed this process. Yet Hunter, through his negligence, shook up the established pattern of giving out land grants. Hunter didn’t follow any fixed rule when distributing grants — he just assigned grants higgledy-piggledy.
This alteration had profound consequences. NSW society became increasingly homogenous (if not harmonious); the free and unfree and ex-unfree-but-now-free all mixed together to a remarkable degree. Completely by laxness and accident, the NSW populace became tightly knit. The colony seethed with the feuds, fights and factions common to all small outposts, but avoided any type of segregation or caste alignment, which turned out to be very good thing indeed and became a defining feature of Australian society.
Hunter’s wheels fall off
John Hunter, originally so enthused, found his inspiration waning as he became embroiled in a power struggle with the hustler-in-chief of the officers of the NSW Corps, John Macarthur.
Having arrived in 1790 with a young family as part of the main body of the NSW Corps on the notorious Second Fleet, and highly ambitious with it, John Macarthur did much of the work under Grose, and later Paterson, to expand cultivation and make things highly lucrative for the officer cartel. Stationed at Parramatta in the rural hinterland, he had repeated run-ins with Reverend Marsden on policing convicts’ morality and other matters of order, decorum and discipline, and they cordially despised each other.
When Hunter first arrived on the scene he had been highly impressed with Macarthur’s capacities, but as time went on his doubts began to grow. Macarthur was an individual who was so intensely driven as to occasionally border on the sociopathic. He had a tendency to take any snub or rebuff as a good excuse to launch furious vendettas. He did exactly this when Hunter questioned some of his practices. Hunter and the NSW officers (the ones that sided with Macarthur at least — others continued to remain very close to Hunter) were soon at each other’s throats.
Hunter looked around for allies and found that the angry Evangelicals, Johnson and Marsden, were ready to step into the new feud. Hunter invited them to send examples of monstrous excess that the NSW Corps officers’ regime had committed to the Colonial Office. The reverends were more than happy to oblige. More outraged reports about the corrupt, debased and much abused state of the colony of NSW followed.
In 1800, Hunter was recalled to Britain in mild ignominy — his administration had proved largely inept. Worst of all, he hadn’t cut expenses. Getting approval from the reverends didn’t alter the impression of a governor with no real control and with many of the NSW officers against him.
King Came, King Saw, King Conquered — Kind Of
In 1800, Hunter was replaced by Philip Gidley King, who swept a new broom through some of the colony’s more rank practices. He tried to make trade and production more diversified, hoping the colony itself would provide the market for the more varied products that would be produced. Less successfully, he also tried to end the rum trade.
Vigorous cost-cutting measures were also the orders of his day, so King introduced a system whereby some convicts were granted conditional freedom on arrival if they had the skills, capital or connections to ensure they could support themselves.
Diversifying trade and production
Like Hunter, King was a veteran of the First Fleet, and so had burned on his memory the original hardships and squalor of the foundation years. He arrived with one very strong official injunction — Cut Down Costs. The colony, said the Colonial Office (and this is only slightly paraphrased), is costing a bomb. Do something about it.
Which King did. For a start, he stopped assigning so many convicts as free labour to private farmers, but he also re-established public farms so he was no longer forced to purchase foodstuffs to feed those convicts still being kept by the government.
King attacked inflation and the ruinously high prices being charged in the colony by effectively managing the government store. King developed the government store into a real alternative to the stores run by the emancipist (ex-convict) traders, some of who were charging frankly extortionate prices. King’s attack on inflation was helped by a glut of incoming commodities and imports. Prices dropped naturally, but at least he was putting in place structures that could permanently assist the settlers.
King also vigorously championed a more diversified economic life in the colony, figuring that if everyone was a simple small-scale farmer (as Britain’s original plan had it), there’d be no-one to buy the surplus crops that the farmers produced.
Having people involved in a range of different industries actually helped those tilling the soil, because they provided a market for what the farmers grew. Not rocket science maybe, but a bit of a conceptual breakthrough. King encouraged entrepreneurs to set up local manufactures, and to further explore trading possibilities in the Pacific region.
King, a keen fan of Adam Smith’s writings about free trade and enterprise, encouraged the development of new industries wherever they looked like becoming profitable. Under his watch, trade with the South Pacific — in pork, in sandalwood, and the occasional human head — all flourished, even though King was also tasked with enforcing the East India Company’s trade monopoly, and countering the highly devious and admittedly quite brilliant ruses employed by the mostly ex-convict businessmen to get around these regulations. King also did much to ensure the whaling grounds near Port Jackson (which American boats were discovering and exploiting at the same time) were actively developed, as well as heavy sealing in Bass Strait. Local industries were encouraged as well; weaving, ship building, leather tanning, textile weaving and dying, pottery and glassblowing, as well as the manufacture of shoes, hats, blankets, soap and candles, all expanded dramatically as traders, forced out of the easy profits to be had from selling high-priced imports, began to think more laterally.
Ending the rum trade (well . . . points for trying)
King went into battle against rum importation and trade, but his actions here were mostly counterproductive. He attacked the grog trade by turning away shiploads of spirits and outlawing private distilling. This, contrary to King’s expectation, actually made things worse — cutting back on grog allowed in or made locally only drove the price up, and it didn’t stop people drinking it. The prohibition also encouraged smuggling in contraband and illicit distilling.
These restrictions meant that if you were a farmer and had, say, a surplus crop of peaches, you weren’t allowed to distil them into liquor, but had to throw them away or feed them to the pigs. This was profoundly irritating.
Pardoning convicts
King instituted a world first in punishment — he began letting convicts go free, conditionally, before their time had expired. This was the first time that what would become known as parole was experimented with anywhere in the world. In NSW, it was called ticket of leave. He also introduced conditional pardons, which were valid in the colony only. King’s rationale for initiating these pardons was again illustrative of the chief priority in these early years: Don’t worry about reforming the blighters, or punishing them either, just save us some money.
King wanted to get as many convicts off public rations as quickly as possible, and if a convict with skills turned up on the incoming shipload — a carpenter, say, or a builder, or a bookkeeper — or had connections and capital, then King would free him or her with a ticket of leave instantly.
In the early years of the colony, no-one cared about making sure convicts were actively punished after they were transported — the prevailing view was let them start earning money and look after themselves. The transportation itself, the act of exile, was seen as the major punishment (until word started leaking back to Britain that convicted felons were getting rich and doing what they wanted). As long as the convicts were transported, and kept out of the way for the period of their sentence, and didn’t cost too much, no-one cared too much about how exactly they spent their time Down Under.
King offered his resignation in 1803 (the stresses of trying to maintain order in an unruly colony seemed to age him considerably) and his resignation was duly accepted.
Fixing up the mess
Thanks to the efforts (and, sometimes, lack of efforts) of various ambitious convicts, the NSW Corps and Governors Hunter and King, the new colony was starting to thrive. However, some of the methods used to create the new productivity had been, let’s say, questionable. On top of that, the convict and ex-convict populace seemed to be placing an exceedingly low priority on decency and decorum. Thanks to the outraged evangelical reverends and missionaries based in NSW, word had gotten back to Britain about these questionable methods and the unruly state of affairs. No-one was pleased.
The British Government thought they needed a man to set everything — and everyone — straight. Instead, they got someone who quickly set about putting everyone’s noses out of joint.
Choosing Bligh for the job
The missionaries had their great patron — William Wilberforce — and he was close to Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was someone who’d long liked to think of himself as the special patron of this colony whose settlement he’d advised (refer to Chapter 3). At the same time, Whitehall was complaining how incredibly expensive this convict colony was still proving to be. They contacted Banks and asked him if he could suggest anyone who might be suitable to go out and bring this colony back into line, destroy this terrible rum monopoly that everyone’s talking about, and put some morality back into this depraved sink of fallen humanity.
‘Actually, yes’, Banks says (or something like it). ‘Come to think of it, I’ve got just the fellow. A naval protégé of mine. Been in some scrapes, got a bad reputation for having crews mutiny on him (happened twice so far, once the infamous Bounty, the other time closer to home). But for a case like this, it’s probably not such a bad thing — he certainly won’t stand any nonsense. Fellow by the name of Bligh.’
Britain had started out with only a vague idea of what sort of shape the colony was going to take. Self-sufficient farming was to be the order of the day for the mass of urban criminals being transported from London.
In sending William Bligh out to Australia, and in instructing him to crack down on various ad hoc practices that had sprung up in the absence of any workable instructions or assistance coming from Britain, the powers that be were working with a set of mistaken assumptions:
They didn’t expect a society to so quickly and spontaneously grow out of the dregs that had been deported. But it had.
They didn’t expect it to be so modern, or so mercantile, or to consist of anything other than convicts and self-sufficient yeoman (peasant-like farmers). But it was and it did.
They fully expected it to be a moral cesspit, thanks largely to both ingrained attitudes about the moral depravity of the criminal underclass, and to the bad press the colony had been given by the evangelicals — Reverends Johnson and Marsden, and missionaries who’d arrived in NSW in the 1790s. But it wasn’t.
Bligh gets down to business
In came Bligh. He knew he’d been chosen by Sir Joseph Banks as the man to bring an unruly and disobedient colony back into line, and that if some serious kicking of heads was in order, those back in the Colonial Office would be fine with that.
Bligh arrived in the colony in 1806 with a very set idea of the sort of place NSW should be. The original vague idea of convicts becoming a self-sufficient rural peasantry had stuck fast in his mind. The problem, however, was that it had never been like that, and it was never going to be like that. By trying to force NSW to revert to a kind of pre-modern self-subsistence economy and society, rather than assist it in its continued adjustment to the mercantile and commercial realities it was part of in the early 19th century, Bligh was trying to force back the tide. The place was not, and never had been, what these original government orders had told it to be. The place, as one historian put it, was ‘born modern’.
Bligh was not the sort of individual to be disconcerted when reality didn’t conform to what he insisted it ought to be. To his grim satisfaction, there was no shortage of felons and ex-felons on the make, with men and women (both free and unfree) involved in ‘dubious’ enterprises like trading and buying and selling. So Bligh got to work.
One of main problems Bligh focused on was the favourite form of incentive payment and extra wage: Rum. He attacked the distillation and rum retailing industry, which the officers had already left and was by this time dominated by soldiers and ex-convicts. The inhabitants of Sydney, who at this point made up more than half of NSW’s total population, were livid; the main populace, made up of convicts, ex-convicts and soldiers, particularly so.
Not content, Bligh then went further. He declared that some who had leases and property rights in the township would have to be evicted to fit in with his new town plans. At the same time, Bligh made it clear that he despised the NSW Corps soldiers, claiming they were no better than the convicts and, as many of them were ex-convicts themselves, couldn’t be trusted. Then he finished it nicely by calling them ‘wretches’, ‘tremendous buggers’ and ‘villains’.
Removing rum as payment
Bligh began by outlawing the use of both rum and promissory notes as mediums of exchange. Rum was still the usual form of payment for many workers and traders. Promissory notes were IOUs that passed from one hand to another and could be traded in and redeemed by the individuals who had first released them.
Both rum payments and notes of exchange had sprung up as Britain had failed to provide the colony with any form of currency in the first place (why should convicts living as happy self-supporting peasants need something so complicated as money, after all?), and became the common mode of making exchanges and payments throughout the colony.
If rum and promissory notes could be replaced as forms of exchange, well and good, but Bligh didn’t replace them, he just outlawed them. No established business owner in the colony could do business without these forms of pseudo-currency. Without them, the wheels of commerce and daily life would grind to a halt.
Quashing all dissension and threatening eviction
When three ex-convict entrepreneurs (Lord, Kable and James Underwood) sent Bligh a (relatively mild) protest letter, he jailed them. Bligh declared the letter insulting.
Then Bligh started threatening Sydney residents with eviction, as he wished to do with the town layout what he was trying to do with the economy — push it back to Phillip’s period. Bligh didn’t like the colonial mess he was being confronted with, and he certainly didn’t like the sprawling, mercantile shanty metropolis of Sydney that had just grown up without, as he put it, ‘any particular design’.
The mess that was Sydney was actually the source of the colony’s greatest strength. No strictly military area of the settlement, no ex-convicts ghetto and no free settlers area existed, and only one convict jail to restrict convicts to was established. On the land and in the town, convicts lived with settlers, both free and emancipated.
Bligh, however, was conducting a campaign against colonial disorder. He had ‘plans which I had formed for the improvement of the town’, and put the fear in people badly by telling them colonial leases may have no legal meaning.
In trying to implement his reforms, Bligh wasn’t helped by his own language and demeanour. He reacted badly to being questioned or disagreed with. When someone brought up the laws of England, he exploded: ‘Damn your laws of England! Don’t talk to me of your laws of England: I will make laws for this colony, and every wretch of you . . . shall be governed by them; or there [pointing to the jail] is your habitation!’
Bligh’s end
It’s hard to find a historian who doesn’t take sides on Bligh, on whether he was either:
A noble but misunderstood, valiant governor trying his best to get rid of that pernicious officer trade cartel, and help out the little guy.
A serial buffoon given to violent threats and outbursts who managed the almost impossible — uniting all the warring factions and overcoming the seething animosities that Sydney was riven with, by bringing everyone (soldiers, ex-cons, officers, traders, house owners and renters) together against him.
Either way it’s impossible to ignore the one really big event of his tenure, and the only violent overthrow of established government in Australia’s history — known (since the 1850s) as the Rum Rebellion.
Soldiers and common populace join forces
The 20th anniversary of NSW’s first settlement (26 January 1808) saw the majority of the population uniting as one — to arrest their own governor! At the desperate urging of ex-officer John Macarthur (who had just escaped from being jailed by Bligh), Major George Johnston led his detachment of the NSW Corps to Government House where Bligh lived. After a few hours of searching and ransacking the house high and low, the marines found and arrested Bligh.
That night bonfires were lit, people got drunk and it was difficult to find anyone in Sydney who didn’t think that the arrest of the blustering, unpredictable governor was a very good idea indeed. And if they didn’t like the idea, they (understandably) stayed fairly quiet.
Most historians will tell you that the arrest of Bligh by the NSW Corps was all about the big players — bold bad Bligh versus Macarthur. And so on. Some have described Johnston as a ‘puppet’ of Macarthur who did his bidding in arresting Bligh.
But the real cause of the Rum Rebellion is to be found in the fact that the ordinary soldiers and common people of Sydney had become utterly meshed with each other, to the extent that the soldiers couldn’t be relied upon to do the Governor’s bidding. In a functional sense they formed a common interest.
If Johnston was a puppet it wasn’t of Macarthur, but of the common soldiers and ordinary populace.
The soldiers who deposed Bligh were in day-to-day life, practically indistinguishable from the ex-convicts in both social and economic background. Most of them had been in NSW since the early 1790s. They had taken convict women, had children, set up businesses and established farms. The NSW Corps had ‘gone native’ in the 18 years or so since its first formation and arrival. The Corps was no longer a reliable arm of the Crown and could no longer be trusted to impose the British government’s will on the local population.
Major George Johnston, at his trial for mutiny in England three years later, explained how the NSW Corps was inextricably involved with the people of Sydney: ‘The soldiers are not at Sydney kept in a state of separation from the people, but mix, marry and live among them, and are in all respects identified with them. They hear their grievances, and would with infinite difficulty, if at all, in a matter of great public concern, be brought to act against them’.
Sorting out fact from legend
The name Rum Rebellion actually does more to confuse than clarify understanding of what actually happened. Rum had basically nothing to do with it, and the notorious ‘rum monopoly’ that the officers of the NSW Corps had established in the colony had been dismantled ten years previously (refer to the section ‘Ending the trading monopoly game’ earlier in this chapter for more on this).
And neither was the disturbance a rebellion, or mutiny, even though that’s what the British government decided to call it when they put Johnston, one of the rebellion’s leaders, on trial for mutiny. Rather, it was a revolt, supported by almost the entire township of Sydney — soldiers, convicts, ex-convicts alike — by those down on the low rungs of the social ladder as well as just about all the established entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the colony who weren’t working for Bligh directly as officials.