Chapter 7
Economic Collapse and the Beginnings of Nationalism
In This Chapter
Learning how to say ‘Ouch!’ when economic depression hits — hard
Calling for an end to transportation
Beginning a proto-national movement
Offering some protection to Aboriginals
The first 50 years of white settlement in Australia saw economic growth and territorial expansion — at first slowly, then rapidly, and in the 1830s, maniacally. The boom came shuddering to a halt in the 1840s when an economic depression hit and the bottom dropped out of the British market for wool, Australia’s main export. Although in the long term the effects were beneficial — pastoralists were forced to improve their techniques, and new products and industries were developed — the short term made for serious economic pain. For the first time ever, unemployment became a big problem, and bankruptcies and bank collapses occurred everywhere.
Meanwhile, the main reason for the original settling of Australia — convict transportation — came to an end on most of mainland Australia in the 1840s. In the late 1840s, however, the British Government changed its mind, and began to dabble with the idea of sending convicts out again. The colonists were furious, and promptly set about organising a movement to counter it.
As the Australian colonies developed through the 1830s, the British Government became more concerned about the treatment of Indigenous Australians. It created new policies to try to ensure that Aborigines in frontier areas were treated with less brutality than the treatment they’d previously received from the settlers. The new laws were largely ignored by settlers.
In this chapter I look at how, despite a cataclysmic economic crunch, the colonists began thinking of their interests as shared and unique in a way that hadn’t occurred previously — creating the first stirrings of nationalism.
Bubble Times: From Speculative Mania to a Big Collapse
The 1820s and 1830s saw a pastoral boom in Australia, as more land was opened up and wool started to be exported (refer to Chapter 6 for more on this expansion and growth). However, by the late 1830s, all this success started to go to people’s heads. Credit was easily available, imports greatly outweighed exports and land started to be bought for purely speculative reasons, with the purchasers quickly turning the land over for a sometimes massive profit.
As they say, all good things must come to an end, and in the early 1840s, the bubble popped — loudly. Many people were wiped out, and insolvency and unemployment were widespread. However, the new colonies proved to be resilient, with industries emerging stronger once the dust had settled.
Working the market into a frenzy
Certain things came together to make for a perfect storm of market bubble and speculative frenzy in the mid- to late 1830s.
An industry in boom conditions. Pastoral Australia was providing the wool for the British industrial revolution, which really began with the mechanisation of the textile industries. This led to an explosion in demand for and production of textiles in woollen mills and factories — so demand for Australian wool was practically insatiable. Even though wool prices peaked in 1836, then dropped by 25 per cent in 1837 and kept falling thereafter, investment capital kept flooding in to NSW.
A vast mass of fertile grassland. Thanks largely to indigenous patterns of fire-stick farming for previous millennia, the land the new settlers took over in the 1820s and 1830s was fertile grassland and could very easily be converted for highly productive use running sheep and growing wool.
The British financial market was beginning to loosen up. Previously, any number of restrictions had been placed on investments in far-flung colonial settlements.
In the 1830s, however, as Britain finally emerged from the post–Napoleonic War slump, the banking sector was substantially liberalised. A great deal of capital started floating around, and a lot of it headed to overseas investments. London banks entered the Australian market in a major way — all the high interest rate investment opportunities made it difficult to resist.
Soon things started to go a little crazy. More land kept being explored and settled, thereby increasing the demand for labour. Convict servants had been filling the breach for the entire history of white Australian settlement but demand was now sucking up more convicted British felons than could be conveniently manufactured. Besides, influential people both in the colonies and in Britain were starting to go off the idea of using transported convicts as a labour force (see the section ‘Moving On from Convictism’ later in this chapter). Convict and self-funded migration began to be supplemented by government-subsidised schemes. Private individuals were also encouraged to nominate and sponsor individuals to be immigrants out to Australia, with the government then reimbursing them with a ‘bounty’ payment.
These new ‘bounty’ migrants weren’t cheap to bring out. The new governor, George Gipps, who took over from Richard Bourke in 1838, turned to the best money-earner he had — land. From 1839 he began fixing the ‘upset price’ (or minimum price) of town lots throughout NSW far above the minimum previously possible in the market, often ignoring the more modest set price suggestions made by the Surveyor General, Thomas Mitchell (the same Mitchell who discovered the vast pastoral country of the Port Phillip district in 1835; refer to Chapter 6).
Investing in land with easy credit
After the liberalisation of the British banking sector in the second half of the 1830s (see preceding section), English banks began to transfer funds from Britain to lend in Australia. Previously, money coming into Australia came through largely unofficial channels — immigrants bringing in cash and goods, and people drawing bills individually from agents in London. Now the new banking system in London began to have its effects in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land, and the newly established English banks gave out loans freely. The pre-existing Australian banks — the Bank of NSW, the Commercial and Union Bank and the Bank of Australasia — were stunned into action, setting up branches in the hinterland and using bank deposits to loan out funds.
Settlement kept spreading, and more and more investment capital kept coming in. So much credit was flooding into the colonies that it was given to practically anyone who asked for it (and plenty who didn’t — starting to sound familiar?). Extravagant consumption of luxury imports became the norm.
Land prices were particularly affected. They were high enough in the booming colony, but after Governor Gipps massively raised the set price of town lots throughout NSW (see the preceding section), combined with the availability of easy credit, prices went into overdrive. Land rapidly became people’s favourite commodity to buy and sell.
At the heart of the newly opened pastoral and squatting country, Melbourne was the epicentre of the real-estate madness. A block of land in the newly surveyed township was sold in 1836 for £150. Given that the annual wage for a skilled tradesman at this time was about £150, you might think fair enough. But that block of land, like surrounding blocks of land, multiplied sixty-fold in value over the next three years, selling in 1839 for £9000.
The land speculation was a market bubble of monumental proportions. Business in Britain was flat, so investors kept coming for the high returns offered by London-based colonial banks to British investors, even as the wool price was heading south due to oversupply and an economic downturn in Europe (see the following section). In Australia, the continued flood of loan capital meant there was money for more and more imports. For the first time in living memory, inflation was becoming a real problem. The madness couldn’t last, and it didn’t.
Ducking for cover as the economy collapses
Around 1840, the incredibly high rate of return on investing in land that had been sustained for most of the 1830s started to fall away. Land prices stalled, then began falling precipitously. Credit dried up and confidence took a tumble.
Apart from a seriously overheated market, the economic collapse was caused by a number of factors:
Settlers reached the limits of the immediately productive land in the fertile south-east Australian crescent.
Drought hit various regions through the late 1830s.
Europe experienced an economic downturn.
British investors, already skittish with their own stock exchange crises and various economic downturns, started to pull out. Soon practically zero capital was coming into the colonies and Australian businesses and farms. Local banks started, belatedly, curtailing credit. A complete collapse in confidence threatened. Soon enough it was actual.
By 1841, the economy was in a serious downturn. In 1842, a complete market collapse took place. Wool prices slipped down still further. Sales of Crown land fell away significantly, and an alarmed Governor Gipps lost a large chunk of his revenue base. He took a knife to his administrative expenditure, which was cut by an incredible 64 per cent. The number of people going bankrupt skyrocketed. Unemployment became seriously endemic for the first time in the Australian colonies. Destitution was widespread and all-pervasive.
Governor Gipps reported to Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley that insolvency was rife ‘amongst all classes’. In Melbourne an interested observer observed gloomily that there was ‘no money, no credit, no trade, nothing but failures. Even the lawyers can scarcely succeed in getting paid. Land is worthless, and cattle and sheep little better’.
Newly assisted immigrants had kept on arriving — disastrously, their numbers peaked just as economic conditions were at their worst. In 1841, some 20,000 men, women and children climbed off the boats in Sydney and Melbourne, only to find no jobs and no livelihood. In 1844, angry mobs of unemployed men confronted Gipps in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Nervously, he promised to do something about it all, but the road to recovery would be long, slow and painful.
Picking up the pieces after the implosion
The economic pain of the 1840s cut deep but, ultimately, it did a lot of good. For starters, it achieved what a much later prime minister (Paul Keating, in his role as treasurer in the 1980s) would have laconically described as a ‘de-spivving’: Most of the speculators and shady dealers were eliminated. But more than that, the old elite, the Exclusives, were largely wiped out.
A growth in exports led the recovery. In 1844, exports actually exceeded imports for the first time — a big improvement on the unsustainable extravagances of the late 1830s when practically everyone enjoyed luxuries, and all the luxuries were imports. Conditions actually improved for workers and labourers in this decade, too, once the intense unemployment lifted. Wages went down, but not nearly as fast as the prices did and, on the whole, the cost of living improved.
Meanwhile, the brash young upstart squatters (read more about them in Chapter 6) had their ranks thinned mightily but emerged stronger at the end of it all, as the pastoral industry kept expanding to make up for the shortfall in prices. They achieved their long-sought aim of security of tenure on their leases, and pre-emptive rights of property purchase when the British Government passed their Waste Lands Act in 1846 and in subsequent Orders-in-Council.
A furious political opponent of the squatters (Robert Lowe) pointed out that while the government was still refusing to sell any land — even ‘the most barren rock’ — for less than £1 an acre, now most pastoral lands were being almost permanently locked up for squatters at the low price of ‘a fifth of a penny per acre’. The ‘waste lands’ of Australia ‘are to be a sheepwalk for ever!’
By the end of the 1840s, with many in the colonies pushing for self-government, the squatters began aspiring to be the new landed elite of the colony. In the early 1850s, one of the leaders of the Pastoral Association, William Wentworth (who appears in more detail in Chapter 6), declared that the new colonial legislature should have an Upper House of landed lease-holders, and be given hereditary titles.
Another opponent of the squatters (Daniel Deniehy), poured vitriolic scorn on this idea, claiming most of those who had gone on to amass great fortunes and large land holdings in the colony had done it through dodgy deals, grog selling and disreputable trade. What sort of hereditary aristocracy would the colonial Upper House have? ‘A bunyip aristocracy!’
The idea to create the Upper House got laughed out of town. But the large-scale squatters continued to dream of holding all the reins of power. (See Chapter 8 for more on what happened in the squatters’ plans for power in the 1850s — when gold was discovered and thousands more people arrived.)
These dreams of grandeur aside, the colonies were again headed in the right direction.
Moving On from Convictism
Transportation was providing the bulk of the labour force to most pastoralists in Australia in the 1830s, but there were plenty who wanted to get rid of the convict system, though many more in London than in the colonies.
Eventually, these voices of dissent were heard, and transportation of convicts to NSW ceased in 1840, causing all sorts of problems in Van Diemen’s Land.
British calls to end convict ‘slavery’
Those against transportation in London were humanitarians and evangelical reformers.
Although sarcastically referred to as ‘the Saints’ (for their patronising, ‘holier than thou’ attitude), the seriously religious Evangelicals had a big achievement to their credit in the 1830s — they led the campaign that successfully banned the institution of slavery in the British Empire. The elimination of slavery in the 1830s affected the whole mood of the age.
The system of convictism, or of transporting criminals as convicts to the other side of the world and then assigning them out as labourers, had been used by Britain since settlement of Australia. With its implication of a master having control of the life and labour of a convict, convictism came to be seen as a horrific form of modern-day slavery — it was necessarily brutal and brutalising. This was especially the view taken by those in London and Britain, who didn’t have any day-to-day understanding of how the convict system actually worked (refer to Chapter 6 for a description of the realities of convict life for most assigned convicts in this period).
Being a convict was a form of slavery, the Brits argued, because the prisoner was the victim of every whim of a master. Even a good master couldn’t help but be a kind of tyrant. If the British claimed to be the upholders of freedom, (and they did), then, like the notorious slavery practised on Caribbean sugar plantations, convict transportation had to be abolished.
In the Australian colonies in the 1830s, few people had any issues with transportation. The only ones who really had a problem with it were the free folk, who had to put up with the stigma of shameful association whenever they returned to Britain. At the time, if you told people in Britain you’d been making money in NSW, they’d look at you funny — and then check their pockets to make sure you hadn’t pickpocketed them. The real colonial outcry against transportation began in the 1840s, after the British Government had already halted transportation to NSW and then tried to reintroduce it using a different system. (See the section ‘Feeling the First Stirrings of Nationalism’ later in this chapter for more on this.)
Ending transportation to NSW
In the 1830s, the British Parliament appointed a Select Committee on Transportation, (also known as the Molesworth Committee), which, giving its final recommendations in 1838, condemned transportation wholeheartedly. They concluded that, thanks to transportation, NSW was now composed of ‘the very dregs of society’. (Which offended no end the upstanding, respectable types in the colonies.)
The view of Australian society as degraded was by now an entrenched British opinion. In the Colonial Office, James Stephen reflected this attitude when he brooded darkly that the well-intentioned British Empire had ‘converted Australia into a den of thieves’.
On top of this, which private settler a convict was assigned to (and most were assigned out) was a game of pot luck — you could get assigned to a generous and easygoing settler, or to a regular tyrant, regardless of what your crime had been.
In Australia, Governor Bourke’s opinion was a little more nuanced. He criticised the effects of the convict system amongst the settlers — but only on the men who were masters of convicts. The effects on the convicts themselves he thought mostly beneficial, or at least largely harmless.
In November 1837, Britain tried to dampen down the outcry by issuing instructions that convicts in Australia would no longer be available for private settlers to use. It wasn’t enough, however, and orders were soon given for transportation of convicts to mainland Australia to be abandoned completely. In November 1840, the convict transport the Eden unloaded the last convicts transported to NSW.
The transportation of convicts wasn’t abandoned completely, however — the plan now was that convicts would be sent to Van Diemen’s Land until they could all be put in gaols in the UK.
Feeling the effects of ending transportation
The cessation of convict transportation produced two immediate effects in NSW:
Self-government, something the emancipist movement had been advocating for a long time, now became possible. Previously, there was (not to put too fine a point on it) no way in hell the Colonial Office or respectable British opinion would countenance self-government while a steady stream of convicts continued to arrive in the colony.
Instead of a governor and his officials ruling, from 1843 a partially elected Legislative Council was established.
The political divide between the Exclusives (free settlers, who thought only people who had never been convicted should have any say in government) and the Emancipists (ex-convicts), which had become more and more intense during the 1820s and 1830s as increasing amounts of free immigrants arrived, collapsed. Leading members of each group (James Macarthur, son of ‘pure merino’ — or the exclusive of the Exclusives — John Macarthur, and William Wentworth, son of a convicted highwayman, being but two examples) came to appreciate their common interests.
In the new council, only those owning or renting substantial property could vote. Exclusives had always feared being overwhelmed by a more representative government, and had desperately fought for a purely nominated council. Now, however, the new body’s voting franchise was so limited that this wasn’t a problem.
‘What’s so “representative” about a government that two-thirds of men can’t vote for?’ the radicals and popular advocates wanted to know. ‘Well, it’s a very select sort of representation,’ replied the newly combined Exclusive and emancipist elite rather comfortably. ‘Sort of “invitation-only” representation, don’t you know. Now . . . run along. The important people have important work to do.’ In this new environment, the old social and political divide between Exclusives and emancipists seemed, well, a bit inconsequential.
Van Diemen’s Land hits saturation point
While the debate over representative government raged in NSW, in Van Diemen’s Land big problems were brewing. As more convicted felons were now being sent to Van Diemen’s Land, the island quickly reached saturation point. They had more convicts than they knew what to do with, especially when a new policy shift to the probation system occurred in 1842.
The probation system was meant to replace the assignment system that had previously been used for the mass of convicts, whereby convicts would get assigned to private settlers. Private settlers had been notoriously blasé about whether convicts actually reformed — all they wanted was good workers, and they weren’t choosy about how they got the convicts to play along. Bribery, incentives, cajolery, abuse and threats — all were used by different settlers in their attempts to get good labour out of their assigned servants.
The new probation system took the entire punishment process out of the hands of private settlers and placed it squarely under government control. This, it was thought, would be a more impartial and closely calibrated form of punishment. New convicts would be placed in government gangs for probationary periods, after which they could, behaviour permitting, qualify for conditional freedom within the colony.
This proved very unpopular with settlers, especially when it became clear that they were still expected to pay for the upkeep of these government gangs in the probation system.
Feeling the First Stirrings of Nationalism
By the 1840s, most people in the colonies of NSW were against any further convicts being transported to Australia (see the preceding section). In Van Diemen’s Land, this came to a head when settlers, angry at having to pay for the upkeep of convicts without having any control over their management, formed the Anti-Transportation League in Launceston (a large town in the north of the island).
At first the league was a local affair, but when Britain threatened to resume sending convicts to NSW, its appeal spread. Soon there were league meetings throughout the colonies — in Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney — making it Australia’s first federal organisation. (See the sidebar ‘Going federal with anti-transportation protests’ for more on the influence of this movement.)
Britain tries turning the convict tap back on
In 1846, six years after transportation of convicts to mainland Australia had ended, word started getting out that transportation might be resumed, and in October the first public meeting was held to protest against this possibility. In Britain, the then Secretary of State for Colonies, future Liberal prime minister Gladstone, gave a pre-emptory rebuke, saying that when it came down to it, it didn’t matter what the colonials thought — if the British national interest demanded transportation, so it would be.
Gladstone had his problems — Van Diemen’s Land (which was now taking all the transported convicts) was stuffed to the gills with convicts — and he refused to rule out mainland transportation options.
Even though Evangelicals and humanitarians had been against convictism in the 1830s, they didn’t run the Empire — they could only apply pressure. Sometimes they were successful, other times not. This was one of the not times.
Gladstone declared (a bit dismissively), ‘Her Majesty’s Government hold it indispensible that within the Australian colonies receptacles should be found for all the convicts and exiles who may be sent from this country . . . This is so momentous an object of national policy that we can acknowledge no conflicting motive . . . of sufficient importance to supersede it’.
Gladstone’s statement didn’t particularly improve anyone’s mood, but then, in 1847, the new Secretary of State for Colonies, Earl Grey, announced the new policy — the official end of transportation to NSW. Wild cheers all round (except the squatters, who began muttering darkly that now the government would start bringing in Indian ‘coolie’ labour instead).
Britain offers exiles instead
Soon after Earl Grey’s announcement of the official end of transportation, however (see preceding section), the waters started to muddy considerably. Earl Grey asked the governor of NSW, Charles Fitzroy, who had succeeded Governor Gipps in 1846, whether he thought Australians might like it if a new form of transportation were introduced. This time, the proposal involved not bringing out convicted criminals per se, but sending convicted criminals who had served their time as prisoners already and were now not being transported but, having finished their sentences, exiled to Australia. They wouldn’t be convicts — they’d be exiles. Fitzroy said he’d check.
Either Fitzroy didn’t check very thoroughly, or he asked only one set of people, because he reported back in early 1848 that NSW would be quite fine with this, so long as an equal number of free migrants was sent out also. As it turned out, however, the people of NSW — Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane especially — were very, very far from being fine about any of this. In the meantime, the British Government had responded to Fitzroy’s report by saying, in effect, ‘Oh, great. We’ll just revoke the old order-in-council abolishing transportation to NSW, and start sending you exiles’.
In 1849, the first of a small number of ships carrying exiles — the Hashemy — arrived in Australian waters, and all hell promptly broke loose. Massive protests took place in Sydney and Melbourne, with people threatening that if Britain continued ignoring the colonists’ most heated wishes like this, they would react by firstly refusing to have any business or trade with those squatters who accepted the exiles, and secondly by getting some guns and rebelling against the mother country, as had happened in America.
At public meetings held by the Anti-Transportation League, speakers declared the colonists could become, if needs be, ‘a free and independent people. Let us have a council of our own, and a Senate of our own’. Whereupon voices in the crowd called out amidst the cheers, ‘Yes, and an army of our own’.
‘The British Government has done away with black slavery,’ a speaker at an Anti-Transportation League meeting held in Melbourne said (an ex-convict himself), ‘but they manufactured white slaves and sent them out here. I am an advocate for trying all legal means first, before I shoulder my musket or rifle, but I’ll be found as ready as any of you when every other means have failed’. To some extent this was bluff and bluster, but even if so, it’s telling of just how angry people were getting about it.
In Melbourne, Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe prudently ordered the ships to sail on to Sydney. They did so, only to be met with a similar reaction. Here Governor Fitzroy, just as prudently, ordered them up to Moreton Bay in modern-day Queensland. The matter continued to dog colonial–imperial relations, with Earl Grey insisting
1. Most of those against transportations were themselves wealthy ex-convicts, so the system couldn’t be that brutal, and they shouldn’t stop other convicts from being given the same chance as they themselves had been given.
2. He was the minister for the colonies, dammit, and they were the colonies, so he could do what he darn well liked with them. So there.
The only thing that finally settled it once and for all was the discovery of gold in NSW and the newly separated Victoria in the early 1850s (see Chapter 8). Now, in the midst of a gold rush that saw hundreds and thousands of men and women desperate to get to Victoria and NSW and head straight for the diggings, insisting on transporting criminals (or ex-criminals) to Australia for free seemed like a really silly idea. The mineral wealth lying beneath the Australian soil dealt the Colonial Office a fait accompli, and after Earl Grey was no longer in charge of the Colonial Office, no-one bothered talking about transporting British criminals to the east coast of Australia again.
Van Diemen’s Land continued to be treated as a sort of specialist convict terminus for criminals, receiving convicts throughout the 1840s and up until 1854. On the other side of the continent, Western Australia bucked the trend and actually requested convicts (see the sidebar ‘A little help, please: Convicts in Western Australia’ for more on this). In total, about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 on 806 ships.
Protecting Indigenous Australians — British Colonial Style
Without doubt, black–white relations were the ugly side of the pastoral expansion. Reports and rumours of frontier killings and deaths were frequent. While, technically, Australian Aborigines were British subjects, deserving of all the protection and rule of law as others, in reality, and far from any central supervision or authority, new settlers shot Aborigines down as if they were (in the words of an early 20th-century historian) ‘wild ducks’.
The mistreatment of Australian Aborigines was happening at a time when public opinion in London was particularly sensitive to the condition of ‘natives’ in imperial domains. The ‘Age of Reform’ had begun in 1830, when a new Whig government shaped new Reform Acts that enfranchised the middle classes and gave seats in parliament to new cities. Vigorous campaigns conducted by humanitarian and evangelical groups to outlaw slavery in British colonies had proved successful. Those parliamentary reformers who had been successful in banning slavery now turned their sights on the condition of ‘natives’ and ‘Aborigines’ in British colonies. And they didn’t like what they saw.
The British set about introducing new measures meant to protect the Australian Aborigines — without budging from the view that the land the Aborigines inhabited was Crown land. They refused to recognise a treaty that was worked out between the Aborigines of Port Phillip and John Batman, but insisted that the perpetrators of a massacre at Myall Creek, where stockmen and convict shepherds killed 22 Aborigines, be punished.
Attempting to protect the Aborigines
Through the efforts of various Evangelical and Quaker philanthropists in London (in particular, Thomas Foxwell Buxton, the noted anti-slavery campaigner), the Aborigines Protection Society was formed. To the society, the condition of free Aborigines ‘who may be termed British’ was dire to the point of disgraceful.
According to the Society, ‘our imported diseases produce frightful ravages; our ardent spirits deprave and consume their population; our unjust laws exclude them from enjoying that first element of well-ordered societies — judicial protection, as well as from the possibility of a timely incorporation with the Colonial communities; while, in addition to all these evils, our neglect of suitable methods of improving them, prevents their adopting the civilised manners and customs to which they are inclined’.
In August 1837, in the Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements tabled its report in the House of Commons. The report suggested reservations of land should be set aside for Aborigines for them to hunt and live peacefully within until they eventually came round to the idea of tilling the soil. The report also suggested more money for missionaries and education, and that special ‘Protectors’ should be appointed who were able to prosecute whites who interfered with the Aborigines.
In January 1838 a new Aboriginal policy arrived for Governor Gipps from Lord Glenelg at the Colonial Office in London. Glenelg, himself an ardent Evangelical and strong humanitarian who had previously voiced deep misgivings about the effect that unsupervised pastoral expansion was having on Indigenous Australians, now lost no time in establishing new rules. The newest squatting district south of the Murray River — Port Phillip, at this stage still part of NSW — was divided into four provinces. A chief protector was appointed, who had four assistants. The Protectorate was to be paid from local revenue.
The Protectorate was not a success. Reports of outrages continued to filter back from the frontier zone of contact. Resented by settlers, who thought that the government seemed more concerned about protecting Aborigines from white attacks than protecting settlers from black incursions, four lone and underfunded men had no hope of policing the vast pastoral frontiers, especially when the majority of the squatting population was given no incentive to try to positively engage with indigenous clans and tribal groupings in the regions they were overrunning.
New possibility on Merri Creek
The new regulations sent by Lord Glenelg, which set up protection zones for the Aborigines, were diametrically opposed to the alternative mode of conciliation that had been suggested by the Port Phillip Association (a handful of Van Diemen’s Land pastoralists, businessmen and entrepreneurs).
In 1835 John Batman crossed Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip on behalf of the association. Like any other prospective squatter in the mid-1830s, he was on the lookout for good sheep grazing country — but he tried a completely different method of acquiring it.
In a bold move, Batman followed the practice that was being adopted in agreements with Maori people in New Zealand. On the bank of the Merri Creek (a tributary of the Yarra River), Batman struck an agreement then signed a treaty with the local Wurundjeri people, a sub-clan of the wider Kulin nation.
Batman, as representative of the Port Phillip Association, promised to keep other settlers from overrunning the country if members of the Association were allowed to graze livestock throughout the region. He told the Aborigines that he had ‘come in a vessel from the other shores to settle amongst them’ and that he was ‘although a white, a countrymen of theirs [Batman was a native-born son of a convict], and would protect them’.
Plenty of people, both at the time of the treaty and since, have criticised the treaty as nothing more than a scam — that Batman used classic trinkets such as beads, knives, tomahawks and mirrors to trick the gullible natives into giving up their land. But this misses the significance of the act, and the possibilities it entailed. Settlement predicated on reaching good relations with local Aborigines, aiming to maintain those relations on a localised family, clan and sheep-station level, and underwritten by the pledge to keep further arrivals out, was something entirely new.
Squatters acting as protectors may seem preposterous, but Batman’s treaty had one great advantage over the Protectorate plan that was eventually adopted at the urging of humanitarians and Evangelicals in London: The treaty combined self-interest with the best interests of Australian Aborigines. If given official endorsement, it would have given settlers themselves real incentive to establish workable relations with the clans local to the regions they were moving into. If black–white relations were to be in any way sustainable in the immediate future, the two groups had to be mutually reconcilable.
If Batman’s treaty had been officially recognised it could have profoundly altered the subsequent nature of Australian settlement. But it wasn’t recognised. Glenelg scotched it, reminding everyone that Indigenous Australians didn’t have ownership of the land to begin with — the Crown did. Therefore they couldn’t strike agreements about access to it. The Protectorate plan became official policy. White and black were to be treated as warring tribes that had to be kept apart at all costs.
Same old tragedy on Myall Creek
If the Port Phillip Association’s attempted treaty was a short-lived and optimistic example of what might have been, the tragedy of Myall Creek and its aftermath is a powerful example of how bad things actually were.
In June 1838, a mere six months after Governor Gipps had received Glenelg’s new instructions and regulations for protecting Aborigines, a group of stockmen and convict shepherds at Myall Creek in the New England District of NSW retaliated against a series of cattle and sheep spearings by shooting, beating and knifing to death some 22 Aboriginal men, women and children from the local Wirrayaraay tribe.
At first this was likely to be just another ‘outrage’ that came back to Sydney in the form of unverified rumour. But Governor Gipps heard of it, had it investigated, and ordered 11 men to be arrested and tried for murder. When they were acquitted in the Supreme Court, Gipps refused to let it be. He ordered a retrial. This time seven men were sentenced to death.
This produced outrage throughout the colony. Petitions demanding reprieves and clemency poured in at Gipps’s office. But Gipps, strengthened by the recent orders and regulations from London, held firm. In December 1838, the men were executed. The Colonial Office backed Gipps’s actions.
Gipps, and the Colonial Office, won the battle — the guilty men were hanged — but lost the war. The executions seemed to only harden hostility in the minds of most white settlers. Killings on the frontier continued — but now they were better hidden.