Bigge had recommended the abolition of the old convict system, and its replacement by sheep men who put the proceeds from convict labour into their own pockets in return for reforming their assigned servants. Just as the development of a society sometimes suggests after the event a pattern not in the minds of its creators, the transition from the old convict system to the new did not always follow the recommendations of Bigge. Between 1821 and 1831 the economic power in the colony belonged to the large settlers and the merchants, and by the end of that period political and social power were beginning to belong to the same group. But all this happened in such a chaotic way, and was so disturbed by the clamour and uproar of faction fights and personal feuds, that the transition might easily be attributed to chance rather than human design.
The transition began with radical changes in the convict system. Brisbane, who succeeded Macquarie as governor in December 1821, was instructed to remove from the towns all convicts capable of being reformed and assign them to the settlers in the country districts, where they would be free from all evil associations and temptations. The government would also benefit by being freed from the expense of victualling, clothing, and housing those convicts. Incorrigible convicts were to be sent to Port Macquarie to the north of Newcastle or to Moreton Bay, the site of the present city of Brisbane. When Moreton Bay proved unsuitable as a convict settlement, Governor Brisbane was ordered to re-occupy Norfolk Island.
At the same time the incentives to reformation in the old convict system were removed. Land grants to emancipists and expirees were abolished. Brisbane was warned that if he did not distinguish between emancipist and immigrant in society he might disgust the free section of the population. He was advised, too, that he should make it as difficult for an emancipist to be appointed to a public office as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. In this way the economic, social and political avenues to preferment for an emancipist were blocked off. The British government was determined that the society of New South Wales should not be rocked by faction fights caused by the accident of its convict origins, and so it was resolved to cut the ground from under the feet of any future Simeon Lords. At the same time the convicts in the penal settlements were not to be pampered by a higher standard of living than that provided by a life of crime in the United Kingdom. But the hope for a society not agitated by hatreds, fears and suspicions between the emancipists and the immigrants did not allow for the longevity of some emancipists, the clannishness of their children, or the supercilious arrogance of the immigrants towards the emancipists and their descendants, which caused the convict question to intrude into every public question in the colony.
In Van Diemen’s Land, on the other hand, the emancipists did not possess sufficient wealth to rouse the fears of the immigrants. In Van Diemen’s Land, too, the supply of convict labour was more able to meet the demand of both government and settler. On the mainland of New South Wales the settlers were clamouring for more and more convict labour. To meet this demand, as well as to reduce still further the cost to the government of feeding the convicts, Darling, who had taken over from Brisbane in 1825, closed down most of the government farms in New South Wales and distributed the convicts amongst the settlers. But still the settlers were not satisfied, mainly because by the end of the decade the number of immigrant settlers had substantially increased.
As early as 1820 the English press had singled out New South Wales as a suitable place to which men of capital might emigrate. With the change of convict policy the British government began to encourage the migration of men of capital and genteel birth to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. In this way New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and later the Western District of Victoria, became lands of opportunity where ploughboys, Scottish crofters, and Irish peasants became landed gentry, and the genteel poor of the United Kingdom were rescued from the fate of becoming ploughboys in their native land. In 1828 one James Henty, a merchant and manager of a bank at Worthing in Kent, who belonged to a family that could trace its history back to the Doomsday Book, wrote to his brother William on the advantages of emigration to New South Wales:
I have come to the conclusion that New South Wales will do more for our family than England ever will … It would be silly to suppose that he [i.e., his brother Charles] can live many years longer on less than two hundred pounds a year, brought up as we all have been unless indeed we chose to descend many steps in the scale of Society and which our feelings could ill stand, having at the same time an opportunity of doing as well and perhaps considerably better in New South Wales, under British Dominion and a fine climate … At the expiration of ten years in New South Wales I shall be much disappointed if we individually are not worth double that sum [i.e., four hundred and forty to five hundred pounds a year]… Our amusements would be in sporting and improving our estates and our business growing fine wool and breeding blood horses for both of which we have good markets.
There were others like the Henty brothers who received from the Colonial Office a letter to the governor of New South Wales or the lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land instructing him to grant the holder land commensurate with the capital at his disposal and every assistance in his power to enable the holder to settle successfully on the land. In this way gentlemen farmers, retired army and naval officers, as well as some needy adventurers, were added to the top layers of colonial society. This meant there was less good land for the men born in the colony, and this heightened the xenophobia of the native-born towards the immigrants. So the faction fight between emancipists and immigrants, which had begun because of the social exclusiveness of the latter, developed into a contest for the landed wealth of New South Wales, with the emancipists fighting for the right of their children to come into their inheritance.
The fears and suspicions of the emancipists were heightened by the grant of a charter to the Australian Agricultural Company in 1825. In return for a grant of one million acres in the hinterland of Port Stephens, a port on the coast of New South Wales to the north of Newcastle, the promoters of the company promised to rear flocks of sheep of the purest and finest breed, to introduce large capital and agricultural skill into the colony, to increase the amount of fine wool for export, and to employ so many convicts that the expenses of government would decrease. The promoters also promised to employ the convicts in a manner conducive to their punishment and reformation. The emancipists protested vociferously against the proposal: the managers of the company, they said, would lay their paws upon the best land they could find. These fears were fed by reports that members of the Macarthur family, notorious for their insolence and exclusiveness to all emancipists, were the main promoters of the scheme in London. At the same time the laws for the ownership and use of land and the exploitation of the labour of the convicts became more favourable to immigrants with capital than to the successful emancipists. So the emancipists came to believe that the British government was handing over to the immigrants the land that belonged to the native-born and their descendants. Experience in New South Wales tended to push the emancipists towards being radicals and Anglophobes and the immigrants towards being conservatives and Anglophiles. As a measure of the difference between the society of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, the grant of a charter to the Van Diemen’s Land Company in 1825 neither excited the immigrants nor soured the emancipists in that colony.
In the meantime the increase in the number of settlers caused an expansion of settlement in New South Wales. Gentlemen immigrants and emancipists took up land in the valley of the Hunter River on the Patrick and Wallis Plains, with the large grants going to the immigrants and the smaller to the emancipists. The Dangar family, whose founder had served under Governor Darling, took up land in the district, as did the Dumaresqs, to found family dynasties at the expense of the Aborigines, the convicts, and possibly the land. The number of settlers in the Bathurst district and in the fertile valley of the Macquarie River also increased. The same pattern of expansion was occurring in the Goulburn-Canberra district, where Robert Campbell, in compensation for earlier losses, was granted twenty thousand acres of land by the governor. The ladder of both social preferment and social prestige was not unlike that of the other European societies, where the founders of a family made their wealth from trade and then took up land to acquire that social prestige wealth alone could not confer. At the same time the settlers in Van Diemen’s Land were less obtrusively occupying the upper reaches of the Derwent from Hobart Town and the valley of the Esk from Port Dalrymple.
To discover more land for prospective settlers as well as to clear up mysteries about the directions and mouths of the inland rivers, the government in New South Wales promoted journeys of exploration. In 1824 Hume and Hovell were instructed by Brisbane to walk to Spencer Gulf in South Australia. They walked as far as Corio Bay in Port Phillip. On their way they discovered a river that they named the Hume, but another explorer, Charles Sturt, later inadvertently cheated the original discoverer of his glory by calling it the Murray. After crossing the river they came on a country that was the finest in soil and incomparably the most English-like in point of climate they had seen, with an admirable port and a river not inferior in magnitude to any known in the colony. When they reported their discoveries in Sydney, the press enthused over this amazing range of pasture, the possible extension to commerce and agriculture, and the advantages of establishing a settlement at Western Port, which Hume and Hovell believed they had reached – whereas in fact they had camped on the western shores of Port Phillip.
In some ways the most significant result of their journey was the unseemly bickering between Hume and Hovell for the glory and honour of being the promoter, leader and main discoverer. Hamilton Hume was native-born, the son of a somewhat unsteady overseer of convicts in New South Wales, and given to boasting of his achievements as a native youth or ‘currency lad’, while William Hovell was an immigrant and a gentleman by birth. Hume said that the idea of the expedition had originated with him, that if it had not been for his perseverance and abilities the object of the journey would never have been accomplished, that Hovell had poor abilities as a bushman and knew little of the interior of the country. With the passage of time Hume’s charges of incompetence against Hovell descended into malicious and spiteful jibes at his cowardice.
In the beginning of the long and anguished struggle of the native-born for recognition, then, they behaved not as those innocents who wandered over the face of the earth before the Fall of Adam, but with the truculence of men with a chip on their shoulder. Hovell bore all these attacks with patience and dignity, though without any overt awareness that he was but the victim of that implacable hatred that characterized the relations between emancipists and immigrants during this period. Hovell saw himself as the man who had first shown how to walk from Sydney to Western Port over a country that, to the south of the Murray, was ‘extremely beautiful, clothed with luxuriant herbage, and both hill and lowland thickly wooded’. Alan Cunningham, a botanist by profession, performed the same sort of service for the country to the far north of Sydney in two journeys. On the first of these, in 1827, he discovered extensive tracts of clear pastoral country in a district subsequently named the Darling Downs in honour of the governor. In the following year he discovered a pass from the Darling Downs down to Moreton Bay.
In the same year Charles Sturt, who was born the son of an English judge in Bengal, India, in 1795, set out to follow the course of the Macquarie River to its mouth. He found a large river, which he named the Darling. He believed this river gave a fresh importance to the distant interior, for it was evident that it was the chief drain for carrying off the waters falling westerly from the coast. It soon became his great objective to ascertain the river’s further direction. He believed, too, that something more powerful than human foresight or human prudence appeared to avert the calamities and dangers with which he and his companions were so frequently threatened. Sturt had a deep and abiding faith in the Providence of that good and all-wise Being to whose care he committed himself.
To clear up the mystery of the mouths of the Murrumbidgee and the Darling, Sturt set out again from Sydney on 10 November, 1829, for the Murrumbidgee, humbly committing the safety of his person and his companions to the protection of Almighty God. With drays and horses the expedition proceeded down the banks of the Murrumbidgee over melancholy tracts of land till January 1830, when progress was impeded by a swamp. Then Sturt and a small party set out in a whale boat, travelling through dreary plains till they came onto a broad and noble river, which Sturt named the Murray, after the gentleman who then presided over the Colonial Office, not realizing this was the same river on which Hume had conferred his own name. Once again chance, rather than spite or malice, robbed the native-born of immortality and conferred it instead on an English official.
On their way down the Murray, Sturt’s party was threatened by the natives, but, thanks to the miraculous intervention of Providence, as Sturt put it, they were saved. Sturt’s faith was too strong to attribute their salvation to chance, and he was too modest to attribute it to his own charismatic powers as a leader, or to the terror of the Aborigine on first meeting gunpowder. Like their predecessors in the interior, Sturt’s men found the effects of syphilis amongst the native tribes truly disgusting: many had lost their noses, and all the glandular parts were considerably affected. On 23 January they discovered the junction of the Murray and the Darling, and then began to pass through an unprofitable and inhospitable country. The men were beginning to complain of sore eyes: they were down to a ration of flour and what they could get with gun and hook, since the meat they had was needed for the dogs they had brought along.
On 9 February, 1830, they arrived at a beautiful lake, which Sturt called Alexandrina Reservoir, where the Murray flowed into the sea. From the top of a hill they saw the waves breaking upon the distant headland. That mystery of the rivers that had perplexed all the explorers of the inland from Oxley to Sturt had been resolved. They then faced the hardships of rowing upstream through an inhospitable land with the men already weakened by their exertions and their poor diet. All this they overcame by that strength to endure and that compassion for all men that religious faith conferred on Sturt.
As a result of the journeys of Hume and Hovell, Cunningham and Sturt, the way was open for the expansion of settlement south to Victoria, north to Queensland, and south-west to South Australia.
Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century the discussion in England on the possible uses of New Holland and New South Wales had centred around the role they could play in the capture of the spice trade with the East Indies and the trade with China and the Pacific, and as a possible base for naval operations in the Pacific. To forestall the French, the British government had established an abortive settlement at Port Phillip in 1803 and permanent settlements at Hobart Town and Port Dalrymple in 1804. Fears of French colonization on the south coasts of New Holland and New South Wales again caused the British to establish garrisons manned by convict labour at King George’s Sound, on the south coast of Western Australia, and Western Port, on the south coast of Victoria, in 1826. In another vain and quixotic attempt to entice trade from Dutch to English merchants they established a settlement on Melville Island off the north coast of Australia, where officers, soldiers, and convicts rotted away their lives in the service of English greed and duplicity, for the English had solemnly handed back Java to the Dutch in 1815. Yet the dream of New Holland as a stepping-stone to the islands of gold and the spices of the Moluccas survived in the minds of the men of the ‘Eastern interest’ in London.
It played a part in the decision to establish a colony on the Swan River in 1829. In July 1828 Captain James Stirling had reported enthusiastically to the Colonial Office on the climate, soil and water supply of the Swan River area. The desire to forestall the French was still influencing official opinion in London, while the ‘Eastern interest’ snatched at yet another opportunity to exploit the wealth of the Indies. An emancipist merchant in Sydney, Solomon Levey, was prepared to invest capital in a colony on the south-west coast of New Holland, and he entered into partnership with Thomas Peel in London. Yet, paradoxically, when the British government accepted the terms under which it was prepared to promote the foundation of a colony on the Swan River, it excluded convicts from the colony and stated that land should be granted to settlers in proportion to the capital they invested. They appointed Stirling the first lieutenant-governor and instructed him to take possession of New Holland under the name of Western Australia. The settlers, workers, officials, and a small party of soldiers landed and officially proclaimed the colony on 18 June, 1829, when Stirling swore, as had Phillip in 1788, that he would not attempt to restore a member of the House of Stuart to the throne of Great Britain and took other oaths to maintain the Protestant ascendancy.
But neither the lofty aims of the Protestant ascendancy nor the more worldly aspirations of the founders were brought to fruition in the early history of Western Australia. In the beginning the inadequate soil and vegetation, rather than the system of land tenure or the folly and greed of the settlers, brought the colony close to ruin. The men who had dreamt of tapping the wealth of Asia were soon confronted with a struggle for survival. The colonial reformers in London, ignorant of the true causes of the anguish and material hardships of the early settlers, added insult to injury by attributing the failure to the stupidity of the men who had drafted the land laws. When the Colonial Office accepted this criticism and imposed a minimum price for crown land in all the Australian colonies, the proceeds to form a fund to pay the passages of immigrants to that colony, the sale of land almost ceased in Western Australia, and with it the emigration fund disappeared. Some settlers in Western Australia migrated to the eastern colonies, while those who remained suffered from a chronic shortage of labour. In 1846 the despairing settlers begged the British Government to make and declare this colony ‘a penal settlement upon an extensive scale’. So another society that had been conceived on the grand scale of putting a part of Australia into a world setting, connecting it with the civilizations of Europe and Asia, was metamorphosed by a barren land and human contrivance into a society concerned with the more elementary problems of food and shelter and the dependence of workers on their employers. Once again the European discovered to his regret that to transplant a civilization it was necessary to use a slave or semi-slave labour force to lay its foundations.
By contrast the politics of the mother colony of New South Wales were disturbed and stormy as a consequence of the use of convict labour. The suspicions and ill-feeling between emancipists and immigrants had introduced a factiousness into its politics as misrepresentation and vilification set the tone of public life. Chaplain Samuel Marsden, who belonged to the immigrant faction, accused Dr Douglass, an emancipist sympathizer, of drunkenness and lifting the skirts of convict girls for most improper purposes. Governor Brisbane accused Marsden of the daily neglect of the spiritual concerns of his parish for the sake of attending to his own multitudinous temporal affairs. Sir John Jamison, a large settler on the Nepean, accused the Macarthurs of disturbing the peace of the colonies for thirty years and of diabolical and self-designing intrigues. To add to the confusion of observers searching for a pattern in the politics of the period, Jamison also accused Governor Brisbane, whose sympathies lay with the emancipists, of encouraging the prostitution of female convicts at Emu Plains. In January 1824 Brisbane accused the Judge of the Supreme Court, Barron Field, who had not visited Government House for two years, of not succeeding in keeping his court free from the spirit of party.
By 1825, the year in which Darling took over from Brisbane as governor, the exclusive section of the immigrant faction had been discredited. A court of inquiry had acquitted Dr Douglass of the charges of drunkenness and fornication. On instructions from Lord Bathurst, Darling sent for Marsden and rebuked him for the party spirit and intemperance that befitted his age as little as the sacred profession to which he belonged. It was the end of Marsden’s career in politics in New South Wales, the end of a sincere and at times tragic attempt to satisfy both God and Mammon. He had failed to win favour from men in high places, or to win the respect of his fellow-men. From that day his lips were often seen to move in prayer as he turned to ask that divine favour that he had also desperately coveted from his earliest years.
Macarthur’s public career also seemed finished. He began to absent himself from the meetings of the legislative council; he ceased to visit Government House. He spoke in private of his plans to aggrandize the Australian Agricultural Company; at other times he spoke of his plans to visit China; again at times he spoke of his plans to visit South America to study the breeding of asses. He was beginning to behave like a wayward child, and spent so much time sitting at home brooding and muttering to himself that doubts were entertained for his sanity. At a time when riches, honour, and affection might have been his desert for his great contribution to the prosperity of the colony in his early days, he had to endure his opponents’ rancour and resentment for his policy of social exclusiveness. Thomas Hobbes Scott, who had accepted the office of Archdeacon of New South Wales in 1823, was also paying the penalty of too-close association with the Macarthur faction, and had become a victim of the scurrilities of the other side. James Bowman, the other public figure in the exclusives’ faction, was a nonenity who owed his public position to his marriage into the Macarthur family. The exclusives had become the victims of their own snobbishness, men haunted by the evil in their past, men who were seeking solace in their religion or in the bosom of their families rather than men with a vision for the future of New South Wales.
By contrast, the emancipists were buoyed up by the belief in the righteousness of their cause and by the enthusiasm of a group of young men of talent who had joined them. The chief of these was William Charles Wentworth, whose great natural talents were driven on by ambition and by wounded pride. He was born in 1790, the son of a surgeon, D’Arcy Wentworth, and a convict woman, Catherine Crowley, who had been transported to Norfolk Island. He grew up in the belief that he belonged by birth to a family of ancient lineage in England and Ireland. He went to England for his early education, returned to the colony, where he was a member of the party that first showed how to cross the Blue Mountains in 1813, and then returned to England to recuperate and to continue his education. By then, apart from his career and his deep affection for his father, the other passion of his life was the prospect of marrying a daughter of the Macarthurs and so aggrandizing his property while ministering to the dictates of his heart. Then the blow fell. In a pamphlet written in London by H. G. Bennet he read that his father had himself been transported. He decided there and then to avenge the honour of his father against this vile slander and to make his own career one of such glory that the honour of his family would be vindicated. The glory of New South Wales became confounded with the promotion of his own career. At the same time he heard that the Macarthurs were implacably opposed to his marriage. So when his private hurts revealed to him what he would fight for, the wound to his heart influenced what he would fight against.
Shortly after his return to the colony he presided at the dinner to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the colony. His angry and aggressive voice converted the traditional conviviality into a call for action for the emancipist side in politics. To drunken shouts of approval, the poet of the emancipists, M. M. Robinson, recited the line ‘That a birthright at home was an inheritance here!’ With fervour they drank the toast ‘The land, boys, we live in!’ for the great emancipist dream was that the land belonged to them and their posterity, not the immigrants. At a public meeting called to draft an address to present to Brisbane, Wentworth, in that ruthless language that damaged both his own prestige and the reputation of the cause with which he was identified, described the exclusives as the ‘yellow snakes of the Colony’ who should be deprived of their venom and their fangs by the emancipists. He demanded the immediate establishment of the two fundamental principles of the British constitution, trial by jury and a house of assembly. The population was adequate: they excelled all other British societies in the great particular of good morals; Sydney was orderly; a free people was entitled to their ancient and free institutions. Only the ‘yellow snakes’, the colonists of rank and wealth, were inimical to the establishment in New South Wales of the British constitution.
In 1825 it looked within their grasp. The new Governor Darling was feeling his way. Young men of ability were serving the emancipist cause. There was R. Wardell, a lawyer and joint editor with Wentworth of the Australian. There was E. S. Hall, an ex-evangelist and, by 1826, editor of the Monitor. There was Robert Howe, the editor of the Sydney Gazette. The Australian and the Monitor by 1826 were propaganda sheets for the emancipist cause. The clergy had been commanded by the archdeacon not to take part in political life. So, in influencing opinion, the press and public meetings were on the emancipists’ side, while the Protestant pulpit was neutral (the priests of the Catholic Church were under the threat of expulsion if they used their pulpits for political propaganda).
By the end of 1827 the emancipists had squandered the advantage they enjoyed. Political comment in the Monitor and the Australian became so slanderous and inflammatory that Darling became alarmed lest the Irish and the convicts be incited to the destruction of all law and order. Events came to a boil when Darling sentenced two soldiers, Sudds and Thompson, who had committed an offence to secure their discharge from military service, to seven years’ hard labour. They were drummed out of the regiment in a ceremony wherein they wore neck collars and chains. Sudds died soon after. The Australian unjustly and irresponsibly attributed his death to wearing ‘the instruments of torture’. Darling began to be exasperated by the use of the case for political purposes. In private Wentworth talked of his plan to impeach Darling for cruelty and tyranny. From all this Darling concluded that Wentworth was a vulgar, ill-bred fellow utterly unconcious of the civilities due from one gentleman to another; that he was a demagogue who was trying to lead the emancipists for his own personal aggrandizement. When Darling made two attempts to control the press, to protect his senior officers from wicked slanders and the lower orders from the evils of sedition, Chief Justice Forbes refused to certify that the bills were not repugnant to the laws of England. The emancipists howled for joy as Darling in his zeal seemed to be illustrating their argument that his government was an arbitrary despotism while their group was merely asking for the birthright of Englishmen.
All through 1827 Darling was harried by the emancipists. At the Turf Club dinner in November Wentworth again overstepped the bounds of propriety and decorum in his speech, and Wardell was so carried away by strong drink and the spirit of the evening as to call out to the band to strike up the tune ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ after they drank a formal toast to the health of the governor. When Darling heard of this fresh insult, he promptly dismissed the officers of his government who had identified themselves publicly with the political demands of Wentworth’s extreme group. The more cautious of the emancipists, who put career before principles, and those who were not touched by the passions driving Wentworth, took fright. At the dinner to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the colony in January 1828 the name of Wentworth was greeted with uneasy silence by men traditionally sympathetic to the cause of the emancipists.
At the same time Darling had got round to putting down on paper his ideas for the future constitution of the colony. The people, he believed, were not ready for a house of assembly; the thoughtful part of the community saw this, and the people in general were indifferent, though a few had been worked upon by Wentworth’s inflammatory speeches and the radical articles in the Monitor and Australian. If they were guided by their friends, Darling believed, the colonists would not have to boast of any great extension of their privileges, and it was altogether better that it should be so. For his part he advised the British government against surrendering to the demand by the Wentworth faction within the emancipists for trial by jury and a house of assembly. This was, in effect, the same advice Macarthur had given to the Colonial Office when he informed them that the opinions of emancipated convicts were not the opinions of the moral and respectable part of the community, who were in fact anxious to disclaim the violent and absurd demands of publicans, bakers, Jews, and other common people.
The views of Darling and Macarthur were incorporated in the Act to Provide for the Administration of Justice in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, which was passed by parliament in 1828. The members of the legislative council were to be appointed by the secretary of state on the recommendation of the governor. There were to be ten to fifteen members consisting of the officials of the government and men chosen from the leading landholders and merchants in the colony. The right of initiative in legislation still rested with the governor, but no law could be passed under any circumstances without the assent of a majority of the members. Any act of the council could be disallowed by parliament within three years of its receiving the governor’s consent. Summaries of new bills had to be published in the press eight days before their introduction to the council. Members of the council were not compelled to take an oath of secrecy. In civil cases the Supreme Court could order trial by jury if both parties required it. In criminal cases the government was empowered to introduce trial by jury when it saw fit. So the degeneration of the emancipists in the eyes of Darling into a drunken, irresponsible rabble prepared the way for the political institutions of New South Wales to be manipulated by those who enjoyed economic power. The curtain was rising on the pastoral age in New South Wales.
In Van Diemen’s Land over the same period political life was not enlivened by any faction fights between immigrants and emancipists. In that colony the supply of convict labour often equalled the demand by government and settlers. Nor was there any group of wealthy emancipists competing with immigrants for land. Nor did any section of the officers or immigrants form themselves into a coterie of exclusives. As in New South Wales, the public life of the colony was influenced by the character and values of the lieutenant-governor. In 1824 Colonel George Arthur took over the seals of office from William Sorell. He was then just forty years of age and enjoyed a reputation as a soldier, an organizer, and an administrator. He belonged to the evangelical group in religion and shared their assumption that the Roman Catholic Church destroyed liberty and reduced its members to poverty. Like most puritans of the time, he behaved with a chilling formality to other men, though the few who stayed with him at the table to lower a second bottle of port found to their surprise that the man had a heart. For in public he behaved with all the implacable austerity of the strong towards the weak and with contempt and disgust for the liar, the drunkard, and the adulterer. With that high seriousness and high-mindedness of the evangelicals, he used the strong arm of the state and the teachings of the parsons to reduce the drunkenness, the gambling, the whoring, and all the other abominations in Van Diemen’s Land.
In 1825, to the delight of the free population of Hobart Town and Port Dalrymple, the British government accepted their requests for the independence of Van Diemen’s Land from New South Wales. After a royal salute was fired, Governor Darling officially proclaimed independence and announced that Van Diemen’s Land was to have a constitution similar to that of New South Wales, a lieutenant-governor, and a legislative council of three to five members. That night the houses of the most loyal and public-spirited inhabitants were illuminated, and many a rosy bumper was emptied round festive boards in toasts to the future prosperity of Ultima Thule.
The next day, when the trivial round and the common tasks were resumed, difficulties and hardships returned to plague the colonists. They had always resented the practice of the government of New South Wales of sending incorrigible criminals to Van Diemen’s Land. They feared their lovely island was being turned into a cage for the vultures of Australia. In an attempt to counter this tendency, and as an indication of how much his mind had been spotted by prejudice against Irish Catholics, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur requested the British government not to send Irish convicts to Van Diemen’s Land: to the impoverishment of Tasmanian society and the future impoverishment of its intellectual and spiritual life. For whereas the culture of New South Wales was enriched by and, up to a point, fashioned by the confrontation of the Protestant upright man and the Irish Catholic image of Christ, Irish Catholics in Van Diemen’s Land were never strong enough in numbers or sufficiently various in social type to emancipate themselves from the ghetto mentality of an oppressed and degraded minority.
The settlers were constantly besieged by bushrangers, who were recruited in the main from absconding Irish convicts. They had taken to the bush to pursue a life of plunder, as their sense of themselves as victims of an ancient wrong lent both savagery and revenge to their plunder of the Protestant settlers. The settlers, too, were constantly besieged by the Aborigines, who travelled in packs of one hundred-odd, so that their numbers compensated for their primitive arms. They surrounded houses, and then, to the accompaniment of blood-curdling yells and the savage barking of their kangaroo dogs, they clubbed settlers and stock-keepers to death. The settlers demanded reprisals. In their rage they forgot just how disastrous their civilization had been to the Aborigines. Of the three to seven thousand Aborigines estimated to be living on the island when the white man established his first settlement in 1804, there were probably three hundred left in 1830. In the towns of Hobart and Port Dalrymple a few high-minded people realized that the hunting of the kangaroo and possum by the European had brought starvation to the Aborigine. A few, too, were puzzled by the disastrous effects of contact with civilization on the Aborigine, and were pained to see that the gift of ‘higher civilization’ degraded the Aborigine into a wretched cadger of alcohol and tobacco. Arthur still believed they should be treated with kindness and compassion. When a group of them came to Hobart Town, he ordered the commissary to feed and clothe them and the police to protect them against insult. But others less high-minded served the Aborigines with drink, provoked them into a fight, and then roared with laughter as they mangled and butchered each other.
Scenes such as these convinced the evangelicals that their first task was to convert and civilize their own people. Their voice of piety was heard more frequently and more effectively during Arthur’s governorship, when chaplains of the Church of England, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, and Catholic priests united at least in accepting the role of the clergyman as a moral policeman for the state. To the evangelicals of all Protestant persuasions, but not to the Catholic, Great Britain was a distinguished nation renowned on earth and highly favoured of heaven. When the evangelical surveyed the material achievements of the first twenty-seven years in the Australian colonies, he was inclined to marvel at such a creation. ‘Britain, and Britain alone,’ a pious evangelical told his flock, ‘could bring about so wondrous an achievement – such a monument of the stupendous energies of a mighty nation.’
During the same time education and religion in New South Wales were being fashioned to serve the interests of a society in which economic and political power was concentrated in the officials, the large proprietors of land, and the wealthy merchants. In 1823 Bathurst asked Thomas Hobbes Scott to advise him on the future education in the schools. Scott, who subsequently became the first archdeacon of New South Wales, recommended a system under which there would be attached to every parish church a school where children would be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism of the Church of England. In addition Scott recommended a secondary school for all who could afford it, with bursaries for the talented but indigent, for Scott, though Tory at heart, had ideas in his head of a career open to talent. He also recommended the future creation of a university; in the meantime he favoured a system of scholarships to enable the gifted to take their degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, thus strengthening the ties between mother country and colony. Scott was inspired by the highest ideals of Christian humanism, though in his attempts to gain converts in New South Wales his seed fell on the stony ground of colonial philistinism, or was choked by the weeds of his own self-esteem and concern for the dignity of his office. With the creation of the Church and Schools Corporation in 1825 the government of New South Wales conferred a monopoly, at least for primary education, on the clergy of the Church of England.
The Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Catholics were thus driven into an alliance of expediency to destroy the Anglican monopoly. In this setting a Presbyterian clergyman began his stormy career in New South Wales. He was the Reverend J. Dunmore Lang, who was born in Scotland in 1799, educated in the best Presbyterian tradition to fear the Catholic Church and all its works, and became a convert to the ideas of the ‘Voluntarys’ in education. From his teachers he received a lively impression of the joys of the elect and the eternal torments of the damned. He arrived in Sydney in 1823. By temperament he was driven to reckless and at times perverse support for the weak and the inferior, not so much out of sympathy with the humble and meek but from pleasure in hurting the proud. So by principle as well as by inclination he was driven to oppose and humble the Anglicans in New South Wales. With him he brought to New South Wales an association between Calvanism and the rights of man, a dream of reconciling Christian teaching with the ideal of the brotherhood of man, and a doubt of man’s ability to create the terrestrial while God created the celestial paradise.
To defeat the Anglicans Lang was prepared to work with the Catholics – to the astonishment and disgust of the Anglican establishment in Sydney and Parramatta. The men of the establishment in Sydney thought the Irish Catholics so benighted and so bereft of every advantage that should adorn the mind of man that, in their eyes, there was nothing but the shade of a Catholic’s skin to distinguish him from an Aborigine. A proof of this seemed to be the fact that these Catholics, who lived in such appalling squalor, were erecting at enormous expense a church in Sydney decorated with tinsel and extravagant ornaments.
By contrast the chaplains of the establishment saw themselves as the guardians of higher civilization and true religion. The God of the Protestants was not a God of social confusion and anarchy, but that creator of rank and order in the natural world and man’s world as described by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Shakespeare were their teachers. They were guarding society against the inroads of anarchy, infidel atheism, false doctrine, heresy and schism. To preserve order in society they prayed in their churches for the welfare of their sovereign – ‘Long may a Protestant crown flourish on the head of England’s King, and let the hierarchy of our country, let every member of the Church of England, let every subject of the realm, let every friend to virtue and social order in every land say, AMEN.’ So one clergyman counselled his flock at St James’ Church on6 September, 1827. The Protestant clergy preached the duty and utility of keeping holy the Sabbath day; they urged the faithful to kneel devoutly during prayer. They urged them to avoid the sins of thieving, swearing, drunkenness, lying, fornication and adultery. They believed that the teaching from the pulpit and a perusal of the Bible and other writings of a religious tendency produced honest and upright servants. The young, especially, were taught to read the Bible, to regard it as the guide of their path and the rule of their lives, so that, under the Divine blessing, they might advance to their eternal salvation. ‘Sobriety and contentment,’ argued one parson, ‘decency and domestic peace will be united around them, and the dawn of that glorious day will have opened on our view, when the young shall grow up in every virtue and the old man finish his course with joy, and slumber in the grave in peace.’
The Anglican establishment still entertained hopes of raising the Aborigines from barbarism to civilization by education. They still hoped that if the minds of the Aborigines were expanded by useful knowledge and their sentiments refined by moral culture, and if, as they put it, ‘they were taught to think as we think, to feel as we feel, to live as we live, then the Aborigines would be blended with the general population’. For, they argued, humanity and Christian mercy constrained them to raise the Aborigines from their abject wretchedness. They should also make some recompense for depriving them of their lands. The best recompense, as they saw it, was to teach the Aborigines to appreciate the advantages of Christian civilization. The difficulty was that, first, the Aborigines spurned the gift, and second, a drunken brawl between Aborigines provided the best spectator sport of the day.
In the up-country districts the Aborigines (known as ‘the blacks’) remained the most formidable enemy the settlers had to encounter. It was downright folly, the settlers argued, to talk of humanity and forbearance because the blacks never could be persuaded into good-fellowship, never could be conciliated, and never could be divested of their treacherous habits. Drop them, the settlers counselled, when they showed fight; strike terror into them, because they were irrational and brute-like. The blacks, they believed, must be treated as an open enemy because the progress of their hostile acts was marked with blood and murder and desolation for the white settlers. This policy, which was always ascendant, drove the Aborigines away from the settled districts and thinned their numbers, though not so catastrophically on the mainland, for the very vastness of the interior provided an opportunity to escape total annihilation.
The behaviour and values of the white men were beginning to be influenced by the climate and environment and the peculiar composition of their society, as well as by their European past, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Enlightened. Before 1830 observers in Sydney were beginning to speculate on the effect of the uniformity of the climate and scenery. They predicted that it would produce such a tameness and feebleness of character that the inhabitants would write little or no poetry and would have no impulse to rise in the scale of morals. In New South Wales, they argued, there was no long summer day or long winter night, no fall of the leaf, no sudden exuberance of flowers in the spring, no song of birds, no deep, continuing twilight, no season of absolute gloom. Instead there was a plain, level uniformity. The imagery of English poetry was not understood by the children of New South Wales. The environment in which poetry had been written in England did not exist in New South Wales. Where, it was asked, were the ‘blue-veined violets, hare-bells, buttercups, daisies, soft silken primroses, the heather or hawthorn’s bloom? Where were the lions, the tigers, elephant, hippopotamus, camel and other noble quadrupeds? The sequestered glens or purling streams, or mountains peaked with snow, the towering crags, or the gushing waterfalls – all that scenery which was sublime?’ By contrast, they argued, New South Wales was flat, uniform and sombre.
The same flatness and dullness prevailed in its society. Men sought distraction and comfort not in art, literature, or religion, but in drinking, making money, and eating. The rest of the heavy, dull hours were consumed in scandal, which had become, in the words of one captious observer, ‘the unrectified, pernicious alcohol, which undermines the enjoyment of more lives, than that ever did which enters the mouth’. Scandal had made every man distrust his neighbour. Difficulties with servants robbed many of the higher use of their leisure. In Sydney the domestic servants were said to be ‘of the worst description under the sun’. The settlers in the country who used convicts to work their estates and serve in the house were afraid to spend time in the towns in social intercourse because the Aborigines or the convict servants might steal or destroy their possessions. Women with social aspirations protested that riding through rows of gum-trees or viewing cornstalks was not to their taste. ‘As to conversation,’ one woman wrote to the Sydney Gazette in 1823, ‘nothing can be so sheepish. Young Arable’s wits are gone a wool gathering – ever since he commenced grazing. Talks of music, and asks for a song, young Wholesale chaunts over an invoice, “Money is your friend, is it not?”’
While the life of the elite at Government House in Sydney and Hobart Town was all pomp, stiffness, and formality, the life of the lower classes was all riot, revelry and drunkenness. Some observers attributed such behaviour to the discrepancy between the sexes, especially amongst the convicts. In New South Wales in 1828, in a total population of 36,598, 16,442 convicts were men and 1,544 were women. In Van Diemen’s Land, in a total population of 20,265, 6,724 convicts were men and 725 were women. All colonial societies in their early history have developed something singular in the relations between the sexes. In the United States the mystery of ‘bundling’ was resorted to by couples who proposed marriage but for economic or social reasons were in no position to consummate it. In South Africa the Dutch settlers, faced with the problem of an excess of males and what they called ‘the first law of nature’, intermarried with the native population. No such solution was open to the convicts. And the emancipists and their children were excluded from all social intercourse with the upper classes by that snobbishness and that policy of exclusion that provided the social cause for tension between immigrant and emancipist. In the early days there had been talk of importing women from the islands of the Pacific or even from China to produce a race of ‘socially benevolent human beings’ at Botany Bay.
The convicts and emancipists quickly found their own solution to the problem: they encouraged the convict women to be prostitutes, which had often caused their transportation in the first place. The clergy thundered against such wickedness, accused them of practising with each other the vices of the Cities of the Plain, or, in an attempt to interest them in marriage, reminded them that at the beginning of the world God had said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ God’s will, the clergy continued, was that man should be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it. But in this as in so much else the convicts ignored advice and followed inclination rather than duty, so that in time the convicts, like the Aborigines, became almost a vanishing race. The colony had the benefit of their labour without handing on to future generations the problem of an underprivileged class. In 1831, however, even the days of the convict domination of society in New South Wales, and to a lesser extent in Van Diemen’s Land, were numbered by a decision in London to assist free workers to emigrate to those colonies.