Between the years 1825 and 1827, according to the Reverend J. Dunmore Lang, it had pleased Divine Providence to visit the colony, in the midst of speculations in land and stock, with an afflictive drought that lasted nearly three years. The effect of this, he continued, combined with the natural result of the sheep and cattle mania, had been to open the eyes of the colonists to their own folly and madness, to blast the golden hopes of multitudes, and to bring many respectable families to poverty and ruin. The years 1840 and 1843 seemed to repeat these events. Speculation in land and stock was again rife: sheep, cattle and land were bought for sums far beyond their real value. Then the crash came. Payments to the banks and other finance companies fell due. Land and stock were offered for sale on a falling market to meet obligations. Prices toppled. Sheep were sold at sixpence per head; cattle, which had been bought at up to six guineas a head, were sold for as low as seven shillings and sixpence; and carriages, which had cost up to one hundred and forty pounds in the days of plenty, were sold for three pounds in the lean months of March and April 1843. Bankruptcy became widespread, and unemployment and distress became so common that in Sydney the legislative council appointed a committee to inquire into the conditions of distressed labourers and mechanics. In Adelaide, as an economy measure, Governor Grey closed down most government works and had one in seven in Adelaide on unemployment relief under conditions, he was proud to say, from which he had deliberately removed all ‘ease and enjoyment’.
Again the clergy pounded their pulpits and implored their congregations to contemplate such suffering as a sign of the displeasure of Almighty God for their sins as well as their madness and their folly. But this time, as evidence of the increasingly secular spirit of the age, others put forward empirical causes for the monetary crisis, such as the high minimum price of land, while others argued that it began from supposing that the wealth of a community could be increased by any other means than human industry and economy. The United States consul in Sydney reported to the State Department in 1842 that the depression was caused in part by local issues, in part by the depression in the United States, which had so materially affected the demand for European manufactures as almost entirely to prostrate the wool-growing interest of New South Wales.
In the depth of this depression, in June 1843, the writs were issued for the first election of twenty-four members to the legislative council of New South Wales. The Sydney Morning Herald told its readers that the issues of the election were whether the executive government was to have an undue preponderance of power, whether labour should be bond or free, whether to protect native industries, how to finance immigration, and the eligibility of emancipists for municipal and legislative honours. The candidates could, the paper believed, be divided into three groups – a government party, a landowner party led by James Macarthur and W. C. Wentworth, and city radicals led by Robert Cooper. A week later the same paper was regretting that the elections generally had taken a personal turn, as with scarcely one exception the contests would not be upon principles. On 1 August, 1843, the new legislative council of twelve government nominees was sworn in, including five official members, large landowners such as Berry and Blaxland, and twenty-four elected members, dominated by such large landowners as James Macarthur, Hannibal Macarthur, James Macarthur Junior, W. C. Wentworth, and W. Lawson, and including Robert Cooper, the workingman’s friend, and the stormy J. D. Lang, who had stood for election for Port Phillip, it was said, because he was too well-known in Sydney.
Within six months the proceedings of the legislative council were plunged into uproar by the publication by Governor Gipps of new squatting regulations. Gipps said that three million acres of crown land were out on lease or licence to the squatters from which the crown collected only seven thousand pounds a year in revenue. He conceded that the squatters could legitimately claim security of tenure on their runs in return for the contribution they were making to the wealth of the community. To raise the revenue of government, to exact a just price from the squatters for the use of the land, and to give them security of tenure, Gipps proposed in April 1844 that the squatters should pay a separate annual licence fee of ten pounds per run, which was not to exceed twenty square miles. No single run should cover an area capable of depasturing more than five hundred head of cattle and seven thousand sheep. Pandemonium broke loose in the squatting community of New South Wales. Meetings were hastily summoned at Scone, Goulburn, Penrith, Mudgee, Camden, Singleton, Melbourne and Sydney. At the Sydney meeting on 9 April Wentworth spoke of his deepest alarm about these regulations, which were unconstitutional in their application, oppressive in their influence, and calculated to add materially to the existing distress of the colony. To thunderous and possibly even drunken applause he called on all present to use every constitutional means to force the government to change the regulations.
The uproar led to renewed agitation for the grant of self-government. Wentworth immediately moved in the legislative council for the appointment of a select committee, with himself in the chair and other landowners and professional and business men of like mind to support him, to inquire into general grievances. In their report they wrote of the evil tendencies that followed from the entire separation of the legislative and executive powers. They wrote, too, of the utter state of pupilage in which the governors of the colonies were held by the necessity of constant reference to Downing Street. The lack in London of the necessary information to decide correctly on questions of a purely local nature, which naturally resulted in wrong decisions and imperfect legislation, was a still greater evil. To remedy the evil of the separation of the legislative and executive power the committee recommended responsible government; to remedy the greater evil of reference to Downing Street the committee recommended self-government, or the absence of all interference on the part of the same authorities, except on questions purely imperial. They wanted the colonial parliament to have the power to legislate on land, immigration, education, posts and telegraphs, and customs, while defence and foreign policy and all related questions were reserved to the Imperial Parliament.
As it had in the agitation for trial by jury and a house of assembly in the 1820s, the intemperate language of Wentworth damaged the cause in official circles in Sydney and London. If true wisdom, wrote the Sydney Morning Herald, consists in the pursuit of the best end by the best means, Wentworth was not a wise man. Often, they went on, his strongest arguments were neutralized by the coarseness and violence with which they were mixed up, and his intentions, though in the main uprightly patriotic, were misunderstood and condemned by the rancorous personalities in which his tongue ran riot. Wentworth, they concluded, had a self-destroying fatality that convinced others that his resolutions on responsible government and self-government were not inspired by a generous love of country, or zeal for the public good, but rather by a wish to annoy and degrade the distinguished officer whom he sneeringly called ‘the Imperial Officer’.
In London the demands were confronted by people who were masters in the art of evasion. Lord Stanley wrote on the demand for responsible government:
Her Majesty must decline to enter into any stipulation at once so abstract and so vague … In neither case [i.e. neither in Canada nor in New South Wales] has the Queen entered into any statement of any Theory or abstract principle of Colonial Government, nor is Her Majesty advised that to discuss such Theories, or to propound such abstract principles, forms any branch of the duties which the laws and constitution of the British Empire call on Her to discharge.
It was the English way of saying ‘not now’, and using the opportunity to lecture the colonials on the first principles of government.
The squatters were more successful with their demand for security of tenure. Under the power conferred on it by the Sale of Waste Land Act of 1846 the Privy Council issued an Order in Council, which was published in the Sydney papers in October 1847. The colony was to be divided into three districts: the settled, the intermediate, and the unsettled, in each of which the squatters could take out leases for up to fourteen years in return for a small annual rental. Freehold in the land could be bought at a minimum price of one pound per acre. Again the squatters howled that all the fruits of their labour were put in jeopardy by armchair theorists in London. By an odd irony the price of one pound, which was intended as a declaration that land should not be sold till it realized more than it was worth, became in effect a declaration that it should not be sold at all.
This meant the accumulation of landed property in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many. For the squatters acquired de facto their security of tenure and with it a monopoly of the grazing and agricultural land of Australia: in New South Wales alone the Order in Council handed over 180,000,000 acres of land to about 1,800 persons. So the regulations that had been designed to prevent dispersion of settlement ended by allotting one hundred thousand acres to some squatters outside the boundaries of location in New South Wales, and this, as a committee of the legislative council pointed out in 1847, could not have been outdone by even the wildest abuse of free grants.
With security, the squatters began to make improvements on their runs, fencing their paddocks and putting up homesteads in brick and stone worthy of their rank and prestige in society. In the settled districts, such as New England, Canberra, the Western District of Victoria, the valley of the Derwent, and the southeastern districts of South Australia, they began to cooperate with the governments in Sydney, Hobart, or Adelaide to erect schools and churches as outward and visible signs of order and civilization. Some squatters at Yass in southern New South Wales summed up their anguish and their nostalgia for older civilization by carving on the bell tower of the Church of England the words, ‘I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.’ The squatters also devoted their energies to the solution of the problem of the chronic shortage of labour in the up-country districts; but the very desperation of their situation caused them to snatch at remedies that robbed them of the reputation and respect they might have enjoyed as stewards of the countryside. Ironically that security of tenure had presented them with the opportunity to adopt such measures.
In the meantime the politics of all the colonies continued to be disturbed by the argument over education. By 1844 it was clear that the denominational system had failed to provide education for the children, and that its failures were more marked in the country districts than in the towns. It was also criticized for its wastefulness, its expense, its aggravation of sectarian sentiment, for enforcing the subservience of the schoolmaster to the parson, and for the poor quality of the teachers since the low stipends attracted only the odd, the bizarre, and the picaresque. The government, the Presbyterians and the dissenters suggested a system of national schools, in which the children would be taught religious opinions but not religious doctrines. But neither the Anglicans nor the Catholics would have a bar of it. To both all attempts to teach something so vague as a religion on which all agreed would lead to indifference and unbelief. Broughton went so far as to tell the chairman of a select committee of the legislative council on education in 1844 that if the children were not to be taught the doctrines of their own persuasion he would rather they were not taught at all. Bishop Polding took the same stand, though he cleverly evaded giving the appearance of preferring ignorance to error.
This time in New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, and South Australia the government had the courage to ignore the prophecies of the priests and parsons on national schools as seedbeds of immorality and unbelief. In the first two colonies between 1848 and 1849 a dual system of education was introduced. A denominational board had the responsibility of dividing among the denominations the money provided by the state. A national board had the finances and power to build schools, equip them, and pay teachers, who were to be persons of Christian sentiment, of calm temper and discretion, and imbued with a spirit of peace, and who were to teach obedience to the law and loyalty to the sovereign. Textbooks were selected in which would be found a large infusion of what all Christians agreed upon as the most important elements of religious truth. Doctrinal religious instruction was to be given at set periods by the clergy of the various Christian persuasions.
The Catholics branded the national schools as Protestant seminaries. Some Protestants were beguiled into accepting them as preferable to surrendering to ‘popish’ domination. In an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable both the denominational and the national schools were starved of funds, and so the quality of both types of education paid the price of sectarian folly. The state was consenting to the growth of an education system wherein three types of schools, Protestant, Catholic, and those run by followers of the Enlightenment, presented fundamentally different views of the nature of man and the meaning of his life.
By contrast in 1851 South Australia created a central board of education from which representatives of the religious denominations as such were specifically excluded. Under its supervision schools were established in which children were given a good secular education based on the Christian religion, apart from all theological and controversial differences on discipline and doctrine, and no denominational catechism was used. The Anglicans and the Catholics protested against the attempt to teach religion without doctrine; the Presbyterians and the dissenters celebrated another victory for the voluntary principle and contemptuously brushed aside the warning of Anglican and Catholic that religion without doctrine prepared the way for an age of unbelief.
While priests and parsons wrangled over the role of religion in education, the squatters were driven to desperate remedies to solve their labour shortage. In 1843, believing they were threatened with inevitable ruin by the scarcity of labour, they proposed to introduce Indian coolies. These men, they argued, were well adapted for the role of shepherds, and had exhibited a remarkable example of honesty and sobriety. Besides, the squatters argued, their residence in this country could not fail to communicate to them the habits of civilized life and, by the removal of prejudices, render them more accessible to the influence and adoption of Christian principles. Impatiently dismissing the cackle about civilization and Christ, Ben Boyd, a whaler from Boyd Town near Eden on the south coast of New South Wales with extensive squatting runs in the Eden-Monaro district, recruited shepherds from the islands of the Pacific. The liberals and humanitarians in the towns reviled him as a greedy monster who was trying to create a new slave trade in the Pacific. The workers in the towns protested against the wickedness of lowering the rate of wages by methods that they said could not fail to hinder the growth of virtue and morality, for coolies, they argued, meant slavery and inferiority. Besides, they went on, the labourers here were Europeans, or the descendants of Europeans.
So in their first attempt to preserve their standard of living the workers consciously argued that Australia should be preserved for the white man. They began to see the squatters as traitors to this idea of a White Australia. The squatters, as a group, would preserve the benefits they had enjoyed under the convict system, to the manifest injury of the other classes of the community. At the same time in London the permanent head of the Colonial Office, James Stephen, wrote two minutes on the squatters’ proposals. In July 1843 he wrote:
… introducing the black race there [from India to New South Wales] would, in my mind, be one of the most unreasonable preferences of the present to the future … There is not in the globe a social interest more momentous – if we look forward for five or six generations – than that of reserving the Continent of New Holland as a place where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste … we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonizing North America from Africa.
Again in September 1843 he minuted that ‘the [coloured people] would debase by their intermixture the nobler European race.’
Faced with the opposition to coloured labour of the professional classes, the middle classes, the workers, and the members of the establishment in England, some squatters turned their minds to the possibility of renewing transportation. When transportation to New South Wales was abolished in 1840, Lord John Russell had planned to reduce the number transported to Van Diemen’s Land by keeping some of the convicts in the United Kingdom. A change of government had upset these plans, and so Van Diemen’s Land was swamped with convicts. Between 1829 and 1840 an average of 1,658 convicts each year had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land; between 1841 and 1846 that number shot up to 3,527. At the same time no provision was made to increase the buildings to house the convicts, nor was the number of officials increased. The settlers did not benefit from the glut of labour because assignment was abolished in Van Diemen’s Land in July 1841 and replaced by the probation system, under which the convicts worked in gangs on government farms or public works. The government of Van Diemen’s Land could not use them because it had been instructed to pay for their services, and the revenue of the colonial government could not meet the cost. So the convicts in the probation gangs, or parties, were employed in producing food for themselves.
Very soon the settlers in the country districts and the inhabitants of the towns began to complain that these probation parties that were intended to be the scenes of reformatory influences were nothing else than the schools of advanced depravity. The parsons wrung their hands in horror at a system of penal discipline that encouraged members of probation gangs to practise nightly the ‘horrid, debasing, disgusting, detestable sin of the Cities of the Plain, who were denounced by Divine fire to extinguish their abominations’. The economics and administrative chaos of the years 1841–46 opened the eyes of the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land to the moral evils of transportation. As soon as Gladstone, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies, heard there was sodomy again in the Australian colonies, he suspended transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1846 for two years.
Some squatters in New South Wales used the opportunity to invite the British government to renew transportation to New South Wales. Under the chairmanship of Wentworth, a committee of the legislative council, well stacked with members of the landed interest, boldly suggested in 1846 that the life of a shepherd or a hutkeeper would humanize and restore a fallen human being and estrange him from his former tastes and pursuits, especially as the way of life would provide ample opportunities to contemplate the power and beneficence of the ‘Great Author of the Universe’. ‘This grand system of National education and immigration,’ as they put it, ‘would ultimately reduce to a mere nominal amount crime and pauperism in Great Britain and, at the same time, solve the labour problems of the squatter.’ In the meantime the British government, under the pressure of an increase in crime, decided to renew transportation to New South Wales, provided the convicts were not assigned to settlers. When the announcement was made in New South Wales, the inhabitants spoke of treachery and breaches of solemn pledges by members of the government.
On 11 June, 1849, a great protest meeting was held at Circular Quay in Sydney to demonstrate against the arrival of the ship Hashemy from London with convicts on board. In spite of continued rain, four or five thousand persons gathered to hear the speakers. To enthusiastic applause, Robert Lowe, an albino who was driven to spite and malice to compensate for all the humiliations he had suffered at boarding school in England, came forward to second the protest. The threat of degradation, he said, had been fulfilled. The stately presence of their city, the beautiful waters of their harbour, were this day again polluted with the presence of that floating hell, a convict ship. To the accompaniment of immense cheers he told them that once again New South Wales must be the university at which those scholars in vice and iniquity finished their course. Again the moral filth of Great Britain had been tipped into New South Wales. This was a breeches-pocket question for the working classes: convicts might increase the profits of the squatters, but for them it was a struggle for liberty and against a system that in every country had destroyed freedom. As in America oppression had been the parent of independence, so it would be in this country. Here, too, injustice and tyranny would ripen into rebellion, and rebellion into independence. After other speeches the meeting dispersed without any noise or tumult, and the conduct of the people throughout, according to the reporter of the Sydney Morning Herald, was grave, decorous, and becoming. In the heat and passion of the moment the meeting entertained wild ideas of taking Government House by storm and forcing the timid Governor Fitz Roy to order the captain to take his cargo of moral filth out on to the high seas. But Government House agreed to receive a deputation, and in the upshot some convicts were sent to the up-country districts and the rest sailed in the Hashemy for Moreton Bay, where the squatters were clamouring for labour and there was no middle or working class to oppose them.
Not all the squatters in eastern Australia had abandoned the hope of convict labour in the face of angry opposition from the working and the middle classes in the towns. The squatters of the Moreton Bay district petitioned for independence from New South Wales provided they could have convicts. Some squatters in Port Phillip did likewise, so that from 1847 in Port Phillip there was a pro-convict group agitating for independence from New South Wales in co-operation with an independence group in Melbourne that was implacably opposed to the renewal of transportation. At the same time anti-transportation associations were formed in all the colonies except Western Australia to agitate against the renewal of transportation on moral grounds. When the convict ship Randolph anchored in Hobson’s Bay in Port Phillip in August 1849, excitement ran high in Melbourne. At a public meeting the inhabitants pledged themselves to cooperate with other colonies determined to reject the use of convicts. On 1 October, 1850, the legislative council of New South Wales, after receiving many petitions against transportation, resolved that no more convicts ought to be sent to any part of the colony.
In the meantime Fitz Roy was writing secretly to London that the anti-transportation movement was the work of designing and disaffected persons who were instilling in the minds of the lower orders of the community sentiments of disloyalty to the government of the mother country. To give the lie to such reports an anti-transportation league was formed in Melbourne in February 1851 whose members pledged themselves to prevent the establishment of English prisons or penal settlements in Australia. Within three months there were branches in all the colonies except Western Australia, and the league had chosen the Southern Cross as the national emblem for the movement. In this way the convict question fostered sentiments of some community of interest between the inhabitants of the Australian colonies. But Lord Grey, relying on the Fitz Roy reports about designing and disaffected persons, was playing into the hands of the hotheads and the extremists by flatly rejecting the resolution of the legislative council of New South Wales and the requests of the anti-transportation league.
So it was the transportation question that had infused a note of urgency into the demands for self-government and responsible government. The inhabitants were so caught up with their heated and acrimonious denunciations of existing constitutions that they devoted no time to thinking about what sort of constitutions they wanted. Most of such thinking was being done in England by men such as Grey and Stephen who had been greatly influenced by the writings of de Tocqueville, especially his work De la Démocratie en Amérique. While the colonists thundered about British oppression, Grey was turning over in his mind the problem of how to introduce that nursery of self-government, experience in local government, in colonies where dispersion of settlement and the use of convicts had developed a high degree of administrative centralization. Grey was also pondering the problem of what provision there could be in the new constitutions against the tyranny of the majority in a society without an aristocracy. He was considering, too, the disadvantages of four colonial parliaments legislating on such subjects as railways, or customs duties, in which the colonies had a common interest, and on which variations in legislation might prove costly. In magnificent periods of language, redolent of the rhythm and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, he drew the attention of the colonists to the case for a federal assembly that could pass legislation binding on all the colonies in certain specified fields.
But the colonists remained implacably single-minded. They sang again their song for self-government, while members of the legislative council of New South Wales added that they were not interested in a federal assembly that could not be dominated by New South Wales; and South Australia, as a hint of future provincial loyalties, rejected the proposal as in a British sense unconstitutional. In their eyes a federation such as existed in the United States was an un-British activity, since it was opposed to the social institutions of the colony, and endangered their colonial experience. Intercolonial customs and different railway gauges were part of the price paid for indulging in such folly. For Grey, after reflecting on the colonial reactions, provided in the final draft of the Australian Colonies Government Act, which passed through parliament in 1850, for the separation of Port Phillip from New South Wales, for legislative councils for New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, South Australia, and Victoria (formerly Port Phillip) in which one-third of the members were nominated and two-thirds elected on a high property qualification. He also included a clause that conferred on these legislative councils the power to draft new constitutions to be submitted for approval to the Imperial Parliament.
When the news of the contents of the Australian Colonies Government Act reached Sydney towards the end of 1850, it was greeted with howls of disappointment. In a ‘Declaration, Protest and Remonstrance’, adopted early in 1851, the legislative council of New South Wales recorded deep disappointment and dissatisfaction at the constitution conferred by the act on the colony.
They protested that the power to tax should be exercised only by the colonial legislature, that the revenue arising from sale of crown land ought to be subject to their control and application, that customs and all other government departments should be subject to the direct supervision and control of the colonial legislature, that offices of trust and emolument should be conferred on the settled inhabitants (the office of governor alone excepted), and that plenary powers of legislation should be conferred upon and exercised by the colonial legislature. They solemnly warned Her Majesty and their fellow-countrymen in the United Kingdom that it would be impossible much longer to maintain the authority of a local executive that was obliged to refer all measures of importance, no matter how great the urgency, to an inexperienced, remote and irresponsible department in London. In Hobart the act was greeted without enthusiasm. The press urged the new council to get more control over local affairs and rescue the colony from the infamy of convictism. The old nominee council, wrote the Hobart Courier, had outlived public respect. Adelaide received the news quietly, with the grave decorum with which the upright are wont to discuss the decisions of their social superiors. In return for the material gains from convicts, the inhabitants of Perth were prepared to forego that birthright of Englishmen to self-government.
When the news reached Melbourne in November 1850, the city gave itself up to a week of celebrations. Special issues of the local papers were published; the Union Jack was hoisted over Flagstaff Hill to a salute of guns; by night the city was illuminated; the churches held special services of thanksgiving; the celebrations lasted a week and ended with a fancy dress ball. During the week the bridge over the Yarra, Prince’s Bridge, was officially opened to traffic. Melbourne was beginning to contemplate that juxtaposition of material and political progress that beguiled the Protestants into declaring themselves the recipients of divine favours, and others to reflect on the superiority of their civilization. Then one day in February 1851 the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, Deas Thomson, who loathed the colonial tendencies towards equality of conditions, opened a letter from a Mr Edward Hargraves announcing that gold had been discovered near Bathurst. History does not record whether Thomson, when he read the letter at the end of a long hot summer in Sydney, perceived that the colonial society he had hoped to see develop in the Australian colonies, headed by a colonial aristocracy that earned its wealth from the growth of fine wool, would disappear like snow before the wind when it confronted the changes that followed the discovery of gold.
In August 1849, in one of those perennial complaints of immigrants against the absence of intellectual culture in colonial societies, a writer to the Sydney Morning Herald posed the question: ‘Gentlemen, is our Australia to become a second Boeotia, a proverb among Nations? What single building or institution do we possess connected with art or science worthy of an enlightened people? Or are there none who care about them?’ He was wrong on the last point, for there were the few, as in all societies, who cared; but they were hopelessly divided in their view of the nature of man and the meaning of his life. Of the 265,503 who lived in New South Wales on the eve of the discovery of gold, the 70,130 in Van Diemen’s Land, the 63,700 in South Australia, and the 4,600-odd who lived in Western Australia, all had been influenced by at least one of the three creative forces in their civilization – Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, and the Enlightenment.
At first sight it appeared that all these colonial societies were agitated and consumed by a never-ending sectarian argument between Protestant and Catholic. The press, the pulpit, the public platforms, the pamphlets, and even at times the proceedings of law courts, were given over to unseemly exchanges between Protestant and Catholic. At the end of July 1838 the town of Sydney was placarded with notices summoning Catholics to a meeting convened by Bishop Polding to protest because Judge Willis of the Supreme Court had charged them with the worship of idols. In 1848 Protestant congregations throughout New South Wales declared the day on which two Anglican clergymen, Sconce and Mackensen, were received into the Roman Catholic Church as a day of mourning and a chastisement by God because in their wickedness they had turned away from Him like lost sheep. A priest of the Catholic Church, John McEncroe, called John Calvin a sodomite and all the leaders of the Protestant revolt in the sixteenth century the slaves of sensual lust. As in earlier periods, the Protestant was obsessed with the horrid nightmare that his high material standard and his personal liberty might be swept aside by an increase in Catholic power. He was affronted, too, by men from poverty-stricken Ireland who had the colossal impertinence to inform him that there was no salvation outside the church of Rome. To the Protestant this opinion could only have been held by men who were morally mad. The Catholic was obsessed by the feeling that exposure to a Protestant-dominated society, whose schools, public buildings, and public ceremonies breathed the very spirit of the Protestant religion, might cause shipwreck to the faith. They harboured, too, the grievance that their inferior position in society was the price to be paid for being Catholic, as the top places in the professions, the business world, and the services were, they believed, reserved for Protestants. So with all the passion of men afraid both for their temporal and their eternal welfare both Protestant and Catholic blackened the hearts of each other in wanton displays of human madness and folly.
Appearances deceived, however, for they distracted attention from the quickening of both Protestant and Catholic culture during the period. The Protestants were enlivened partly by the coming of the ‘Anglo-Catholic’ Tractarian movement to the Australian colonies – the two main proselytizers were Broughton in New South Wales and Nixon in Van Diemen’s Land. Outside the Anglican church the Protestants were enlivened and strengthened by the coming of the Voluntarys and by the evangelical revival in England and Scotland. They were strengthened, too, at least temporarily, by the arrival of men such as Carmichael and Mansfield who believed there was such a thing as the religion of everyman, a religion without a catechism and without doctrines, firmly based on revelation of God’s word in the Old and the New Testament. At the same time their religion drew inspiration from the teaching of the Enlightenment on human brotherhood and the possibility of achieving happiness on earth. By the 1840s the Protestants were not only split into a bewildering variety of sects, but were beginning to be divided in their vision of the world. Amongst the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, and even some Methodists there were those who viewed the life of man as an act of tragic grandeur. They had learnt their vision of life in a stern school. From Shakespeare they learnt that the flaws in the clay of men who had the stuff of greatness in them brought them deep damnation on earth. From the stories of Absalom, and Susanna and the Elders, from the books of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, and from some of the Psalms, they learnt that evil men were more powerful than good, that the righteous were not rewarded in this world, and that men endowed with charity and compassion were impotent against the wicked.
By contrast the piety preached for the many by the Protestants was still concerned with morality. A correspondent at Burra, South Australia, was pleased to report in 1849 that that bane of the human race, inebriety, was fast fleeing from Burra through the instrumentality of the total abstinence society. At a recent tea party, he noted with pleasure, there was barely elbow room, and the tables were loaded with tea and biscuits and cakes. Many who could not obtain standing room within thronged the building outside. ‘The congregated sons and daughters of sobriety and rational enjoyment,’ he continued, ‘were addressed by some eight or ten speakers, the speeches being interspersed with temperance hymns, to which every effort was given by a band of able musicians.’ By their fulsome support for temperance movements, as well as for the reduction of prostitution and gambling, the Protestant clergy were identified in the public eye as moral policemen for a particular way of life rather than teachers by precept and example of the way to salvation. By continuing to counsel subordination and to urge the poor to accept their lowly station in life, they prostituted their religion to the service of the social needs of the classes in power in the Australian colonies and in London. For good or evil the Protestant clergy had allowed their religion to become a religion of social utility and its reputation to depend on the survival in that society of the need for moral policemen.
On the other hand the Catholic priests from Ireland behaved in such a way as to cause those outside their church to identify it with the worldly aspirations of the Irish people. From the priest the faithful were taught the wrongs against Ireland and the sins of the Protestants with the same zeal as they were taught to say the rosary. In this way the Catholic Church, like the Protestant churches, tended to become a religion of social utility. Like the Protestant clergy, the priests assumed the role of moral policemen, denouncing drunkenness, whoring and gambling. But again appearances deceived, for the Catholic Church in New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, and Western Australia began to be affected by the Catholic intellectual revival in England during this period. This was brought to the Australian colonies by such Benedictine priests as Ullathorne and Polding in New South Wales, Willson in Van Diemen’s Land, and the Spanish Benedictines at New Norcia near Perth. They spoke of the Catholic Church as the creator of European civilization, and of its lofty and noble traditions rather than of that priest-ridden, sectarian-tainted, bigoted, and superstitious corruption of Christianity that had emerged from centuries of poverty and oppression in Ireland, still preserving by some miracle the image of Christ and the Holy Mother of God. While the Irish priests were sympathetic to the wordly aspirations of the Irish lower classes, the Benedictines taught the case for rank and for inequality in society.
At the same time the bush workers were groping towards quite a different set of values. Ignorant of the consolations of religion, untouched by the traditions and conventions of European society, they looked for a comforter to offset the loneliness of their lives and to protect them against its dangers. They found it in mateship. One observer noted:
There is a great deal of this mutual regard and trust engendered by two men working thus together in the otherwise solitary bush; habits of mutual helpfulness arise, and these elicit gratitude, and that leads on to regard. Men under these circumstances often stand by one another through thick and thin; in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his own mate in anything.
The same conditions promoted a belief in equality and the habit of judging a man by his performance rather than his inheritance. Prepared to stand by each other in anything, the bushmen were at the same time morbidly suspicious of the newcomer or the intruder who might upset their monopoly of labour, or disturb their way of life. The sentiments of mateship tended to be reserved for the native-born, and the ideals that were the offspring of their loneliness and isolation became in turn forces to strengthen their provincialism and their xenophobia.