During the years 1858 to 1861 a colonial minstrel, Charles Thatcher, wandered from town to town in the colony of Victoria singing to audiences who clapped, catcalled, whistled, and cheered him to the echo as he boasted of the power of the people to:
Upset squatterdom’s domination,
Give every poor man a home,
Encourage our great population,
And like wanderers no more we’ll roam;
Give, in mercy, a free scope to labour,
Uphold purest bold industry,
Then no one will envy his neighbour,
But contented and happy will be.
The bourgeoisie began to upset squatterdom’s domination when they changed the land laws of the colonies. In the cities, towns and countryside the cry went up to ‘unlock the lands’. The bourgeoisie in the cities took their stand on the principle of equality of opportunity. The bourgeoisie also argued that the squatters’ use of the land had been wasteful. Out of the 31,467,816 acres in the hands of squatters as licensed runs in the colony of Victoria in 1858, the annual yield for home consumption in the colony and for export had a net value of only 1,997,469 pounds, or one shilling, three and one-halfpence per acre. Besides, those who occupied the thirty-odd million acres could not supply the people of Victoria with food. The pastoral tenant had gathered the land’s riches and left behind a crop of thistles and burrs and the dilapidated remnants of a few miserable huts. By the lavish alienation of immense tracts of land in the period before 1851 the richest and most accessible lands of the colony had been permanently placed out of the people’s reach. In the eyes of the bourgeoisie the squatters’ monopoly was wasteful and offended against their principle of equality of opportunity in access to the land. It also repressed the progress of agriculture and retarded the extension of settlement. Australia, they argued, was in danger of remaining a sheep walk for ever.
In the cities the radicals campaigned for homesteads for the people and manhood suffrage, and spoke recklessly to excited groups of the right of the people to take spoils from the landowning and monied interests to enable them to rise above the condition of labourers. At a meeting at the Denison Hotel in Sydney in December 1860 a Mr Cheater told an enthusiastic audience that the land was
all free at first, but them as had a big grip liked to keep it. It would be better for ’em to loose their grip, and let some of the little ’uns amongst them. It would be better to give land for nothing for six years to come … Let them give the land, and not lock it up, so as they might not send out of the country for grain, while they had plenty of beautiful country to grow it in here.
To the Sydney Morning Herald – indeed, to all conservatives – the Cheater speech and the meeting itself partook of the character of a burlesque. Earlier, in Sydney in 1857, a Mr Read had harangued a group on equal electoral districts, manhood suffrage, and free land for the people, but was checked with such interjections as ‘He’s drunk’ and ‘Stop till you’re sober’, till he sat down and the meeting closed in a rather chaotic way.
It was one thing to talk of equality of opportunity, or of free land, but another thing to show how either was to be achieved. As John Robertson, a large land-owner and businessman in Sydney and an advocate for land reform, explained when he opened the second reading debate in the legislative assembly of New South Wales on the Crown Land Alienation Bill in 1860: ‘… it would be recollected that they had not a clean sheet upon which to legislate – that there were existing interests. There was one of great importance – the pastoral interest.’ He wanted to facilitate the permanent occupation of the country by freeholders with as little injury as possible to the pastoral interest.
During the same debate in the parliament of New South Wales some of the squatters, donning mantles in the fashion of those earlier prophets in the wilderness from whom the parsons read to them during Sunday service, prophesied that land reform would bring everything to ruin. Free selection, they argued, would aim a blow at the pastoral interest and injure a class that had given to the colony its largest exports. It would lead to dispersion of settlement, which would encourage crime and drunkenness; it would lead to over-production, which in turn would pauperize and depress the selector. Where, the squatters asked, was the market for the produce of the selector? Where was the transport to move it to market? Where was the finance to stock and equip the selector and tide him over the vagaries of prices and climate? The Sydney Morning Herald warned its readers of the democratic torrent that was levelling all barriers to tyranny; if the people used the rights of property at their discretion, then let them roar among their ruins, dance about their fires, and revel among their pigs.
But the warnings were swept aside in the passions of the moment. In 1861 the parliament of New South Wales passed two acts – an Alienation Act and an Occupation Act – that were intended to be a compromise ‘to preserve old rights while granting new ones – to keep faith with the past while doing justice to the future’. From the first day of January 1862 any person could purchase between forty and three hundred and twenty acres of crown land other than town lands, suburban lands, or proclaimed goldfields at twenty shillings per acre, provided he deposited twenty-five per cent of the purchase money and paid the balance within three years to the colonial treasurer, to whom he was to tender a declaration on improvements and effective residence. A portion of the money raised from such sales was to be used to pay the passages of immigrants.
In Victoria the Duffy Act of 1862 proclaimed ten million acres as agricultural areas. Any person, except infants or married women whose marriage was still valid, could select a block between forty and six hundred and forty acres for one pound an acre, part to be paid as a deposit on the day of selection and the balance over eight years at two shillings and sixpence per acre per year. The selector was to cultivate one acre in ten, or to erect a habitable dwelling, or to enclose his selection with a substantial fence. One quarter of the land fund was to be used to pay the passages of immigrants.
The Selection Act of 1868 in Queensland proclaimed crown land open for selection in two classes: agricultural land to be purchased at fifteen shillings an acre in ten annual instalments; second-class pastoral land at five shillings per acre in ten annual instalments of sixpence per acre. The selector was to erect and maintain boundary marks, and either his agent or his bailiff was to reside on the selection. No infant or married woman was entitled to select land.
In South Australia the Strangways Act of 1869 proclaimed certain agricultural areas open to selection, in which any person could purchase up to six hundred and forty acres of agricultural land at one pound per acre, on payment of a deposit and the balance at the end of four years.
The results varied from colony to colony. In New South Wales the selection acts divided the rural population into two hostile camps and encouraged a class war between squatter and selector for the possession of land. Each group practised every species of fraud and abuse against the other. ‘Dummying’, ‘picking the eyes’ of a run, bribery of officials in the lands department, arson and physical violence, became the order of the day. To protect what they believed to be their legitimate interests against aggression by the selectors, some squatters mortgaged their estates to the banks or the pastoral companies, and were reduced to the status of managers of land over which they had once enjoyed the power and prestige of ownership. The methods to which the squatters stooped to protect their interests continued that alienation from the rest of the community that had begun when their fathers had attempted to revive the transportation of convicts, or to import coolie labour in the 1840s, in a desperate attempt to obtain cheap and servile workers on their estates.
The selectors fared no better. Of the 170,242 who lodged original applications to take up selections in the colony of New South Wales between 1861 and 1880, only eighteen to twenty thousand held homesteads according to the intent of the law in 1880. In the district of Deniliquin, of the fourteen hundred who purchased selections between 1861 and 1880 only two hundred and forty-four remained in possession in 1880. In the electorate of Murray, to the south of Deniliquin, of twenty-one hundred who took up selections five hundred and ninety remained in occupation. During the same years the revenue to the New South Wales government from the sale of crown land increased from £212,750 15s l0d in 1862 to £2,351,226 6s 11d in 1882. Over the same years wheat cultivation in New South Wales increased from 128,829 acres in 1860–61 to 253,138 in 1880–81. But it was the squatters buying agricultural land under the selection acts, rather than the selectors, who boosted government revenue and doubled the area under wheat.
Most of the selectors in New South Wales lived in appalling squalor. Some lived in bark humpies where the rooms were partitioned off by bark and bag, with beaten earth as their flooring, bushel bags stretched between poles for beds, packing cases for dressing-tables, rough slab tables on stakes driven into the ground, seats made the same way as their furniture, and cuttings from old numbers of the Illustrated London News and family albums as the sole decoration on the walls. The crockery was cracked and dirty. In the districts of New South Wales opened up by the selectors there were many such slums in the wilderness, where father, mother and children slaved amid squalor, filth, ignorance and superstition to make a living on the land.
Vagaries of the climate and prices, the lack of agricultural equipment and capital, ignorance, and inadequate or expensive transport to market, contributed to their penury. Some obtained stock, seed and supplies from stock and station agents, or local owners of the general stores, who sometimes charged interest rates as high as 80 per cent. When they were unable to meet their commitments, the creditors foreclosed. Such selectors either became workers for wages in the district or moved to the cities in search for work. Some hung on in the hope that one day they might earn a competence to reward them for the years of anguish and penury. It was not until the twentieth century, when agricultural machinery was introduced on a fairly wide scale and when government financial assistance began to relieve the selector from the clutches of the money-lenders, that slavery and squalor began to disappear. It was not until World War II, when there was a boom in world prices for agricultural produce that some small farmers in New South Wales could afford such creature comforts of civilization as sinks in the kitchen and boarded flooring, and so begin to relieve their wives and children from sun-up to sundown drudgery. The recurring sore that distinguished the descriptions of the life of the selectors in Henry Lawson’s Water Them Geraniums, Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies, and Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection was then covered up with a sentimental poultice and the slap-stick humour of Dad, Mum, Dave and Mabel. So time converted human agony into a huge joke.
In Victoria and South Australia the attempt to substitute a numerous yeomanry owning their own farms for a few pastoral lessees met with more success. Within four years of the passing of the Grant Act of 1865 in Victoria over 30,000 persons had taken up selections. Swagmen who had tramped idly from one end of Victoria to the other and wandering miners settled down on their selections. In South Australia, according to one apologist, the land acts, if not an unqualified success, had certainly proved no failure, since settlement had actually taken place. In both colonies the financial difficulties of the selectors, rather than the cunning dodges of the squatters, the activities of the blackmailers, or the corruption of the officials in the lands department, were the main cause of penury or failure. To make the improvements on the land prescribed by law, selectors often had to borrow from banks, money-lending agents and storekeepers. When they failed to meet their commitments, the land fell into the hands of their creditors, who thus became the owners of large estates. In this way the shrewd country storekeeper or stock and station agent climbed a rung or two on the social ladder by adding the prestige of broad acres to the wealth accumulated in trade, though not all did, for as one man testified to a Victorian parliamentary committee in 1878, ‘Bad debts do not make rich men.’
A few advanced to wealth and even respectability by sheep and cattle ‘duffing’ (stealing). William John ‘Big’ Clarke, who was so huge that in his declining years it took four men to carry him from his carriage into a house, made a fortune selling stolen cattle. By the 1870s he owned one hundred and twenty thousand acres in Victoria, fifty thousand acres in Tasmania, and was estimated to be worth two and a half million pounds. He was a director of the Colonial Bank, Melbourne, and a member of the legislative council. His private life was just as passionate as his greed for money: the colonies were sprinkled with the bastards he had fathered as well as the men he had defrauded. He died in 1874, at a time when at least lip service was paid to the belief that flagrant violators of the Ten Commandments should expect neither reward nor money in this world. The Melbourne Punch wrote: ‘Mrs Grundy is by no means pleased at the disposition of his property [a reference to bequests to his illegitimate children], but really the old lady is riled at the man dying so rich.’
With a low cunning, Hugh Glass exploited the loopholes in the land laws of Victoria before the passing of the first selection act in 1862. He became the lessee of over a million acres by such a lavish use of dummies that at one time he had three hundred on his payroll. He put up an expensive house in Melbourne, with an artificial lake on which swans floated with a dignity their sponsor lacked, and there were tanks of strange fish and aviaries in which rare and exotic birds delighted his guests. Around his dining table he gathered men of wit, refinement and culture. In the late 1860s rumours of corruption by Glass were circulating in press and parliament. The respectable took fright. When a fall in prices for wool in 1871 left Glass unable to meet his commitments, he drank poison rather man endure the humiliation and shame of failure.
Not all the squatters or large landowners lived with the flamboyancy and disregard for the laws of both God and man of ‘Big’ Clarke and Hugh Glass. Between 1850 and 1870 the squatters in the eastern colonies used the accumulated wealth and the de facto security of tenure conferred by the Order in Council of 1847 to make improvements on their runs. They fenced them off to enable them to dispense with shepherds; they dug holes in the ground (known as tanks in New South Wales and dams in Victoria) in which to store water. They built homesteads on their estates, quarried from local stone, so that limestone became the fashion in Yass and Canberra, redstone in New England, and bluestone throughout the Western District of Victoria. In front of each house there was generally a wide veranda over which creepers grew to provide shade in the long hot summers. There was also a croquet lawn, and flower gardens sloped away to a nearby watercourse. The drawing-room was richly ornamented with furnishings, paintings, and objets d’art collected during tours of Europe, and the library was filled with the principal works of English history, literature, and religion, and copies of such periodicals as Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh Review, and the Melbourne Punch. The bedrooms, kitchens, and servants’ quarters ran along the two arms of a U-shaped back courtyard. At a suitable distance there were huts for the men, or a house for a married couple, and sheds to house the shearers and other seasonal workers employed from time to time on the run.
Between the squatter and his men a great gulf began to open. The more opulent put up town houses in Melbourne, Sydney, or Adelaide, and during the spring the men yarned and drank and cursed the democratic tendencies of the age at the Melbourne Club, or the Australian Club in Sydney, or the Adelaide Club, while their women displayed their finery promenading The Block in Collins Street, Melbourne, round Mrs Macquarie’s Road in Sydney, and down King William Street in Adelaide. While parents laboured on their estates or pursued pleasure during the spring season in the cities, their children were instructed in the refinements of civilization at such schools as Melbourne and Geelong Grammar Schools or Scotch College in Victoria, The King’s School in New South Wales, and St Peter’s in South Australia. For all the eye could tell their world went well.
Yet some of the seeds that later deprived them of pre-eminence and glory had been sown before they erected these outward and visible signs of their opulence and achievement. Manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, and the abolition of property qualifications for members of the colonial parliaments had deprived them in 1856–58 of their majorities in the legislative assemblies of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. The nominee system of appointment to the legislative councils of New South Wales and Queensland, and the high property qualification for voters for the legislative councils of Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, presented them with the occasion as well as the temptation to present their idea of politics as the representation of ‘interests’, by which the interests of the minority were protected against the tyranny of the majority. But the price of supporting government by an elite of ‘interests’, was further ridicule and abuse from the bourgeoisie and workers in the towns.
This was the golden age of the bourgeoisie, and in the cities that class was laying up for itself treasures on earth, putting up monuments in brick and stone in wanton displays of their wealth and their vision of the meaning of life. In Sydney and Melbourne the bourgeoisie accumulated wealth from manufacturing, the building trades, the import trades, and law and medicine. In both cities the most important industries were clothing, printing, iron foundries, metal-working, carriage-building, furniture, food, brewing, tanning, sawmilling and brick manufacture. Clothing workshops or factories employed an average of fifty workers per factory by 1871 in both Sydney and Melbourne. Employees in manufacturing comprised just over ten per cent of the labour force in both New South Wales and Victoria by 1891.
From 1861 to 1883 the great boom was in the building trades. In 1852 Joseph Reed, an architect from England, arrived in Melbourne to make his fortune on the goldfields, but found one instead in his own profession. Reed’s work summed up the values of the period, especially his use of the baroque dome as the symbol of superfluous wealth and conspicuous waste. Between 1855 and 1880 he designed the town hall, the Exhibition Building, Wilson Hall at the university, the Independent and Scots Churches, the Bank of Australasia, the Bank of New South Wales and the Trades Hall, thus indelibly imprinting his ideas on the appearance of Melbourne in buildings in which the quest of the bourgeoisie for display was reconciled with their passion for the solid and the secure. Over the same period in Sydney the baroque began to mingle and clash with the chaste lines of Regency buildings put up in the age of Macquarie. Hobart and Launceston suffered similar fates, while Adelaide and Brisbane suffered the baroque to grow in ostentatious and solitary splendour.
The same tendencies were reflected in the houses put up to meet the sudden increase in population caused by the gold rushes. During the decade 1851–61 half a generation of Australians had lived under canvas or in huts. In the towns the mansions of the successful were piles of grey and turreted masonry in ‘Gothic’ or ‘Classic’ or both. They were insulated by park-like grounds from endless unmade streets, which were rapidly lined with smaller separate or terraced dwellings. To flaunt their devotion to the bitch goddess of success, or, more charitably, to prove their devotion to the same ideals as the bourgeoisie, the veranda of the five-room villa of the petit bourgeois or worker sprouted the same iron lace edging, the same plaster urns, and the same stained-glass window framing to the front door as the master’s mansion. Most houses were single-storeyed. The style was eclectic and European, but American influence in the shape of labour-saving devices began to penetrate the servantless houses by the back door. The kitchen, which was generally detached in the pre-gold period, began to be tacked on to the rear of the house. Like the homes of the squatters, the farmers, and the rich bourgeois, the houses in suburbia had verandas to protect their inhabitants against the summer sun.
By contrast, some of the working class in the cities lived in abject poverty. In Sydney, according to an observer in 1860, a block of twenty or twenty-five wretched hovels afforded shelter for perhaps a hundred human beings. A family lived in two rooms, each ten or twelve feet square and barely high enough for a man to stand erect. The floor was often lower than the ground, and the ceiling often leaked, so that water poured in off the streets, bringing filth of all kinds. Few of the houses had such domestic conveniences as indoor sinks, pantries, stoves and clothes closets. The high rents caused overcrowding, so that in houses occupied by Europeans as many as seven men and seven women squeezed somehow into two rooms, while in houses occupied by the Chinese as many as three hundred and fifteen crowded into one building. In their daily lives the people were surrounded by ignorance and squalor, while their children, it was said, floated ‘about the streets and lanes like fish in a pond’. Vagrant children infested the streets of Sydney; prostitution thrived as parents sold their daughters to supplement their incomes. The clergy grieved at such misery and vice, but the bourgeoisie looked only to their plenty and their virtue. In Melbourne, too, sweated labour, jerry-built houses and overcrowding created a contrast of bourgeois opulence south of the Yarra and working-class squalor in the industrial suburbs of Fitzroy, Collingwood, and even Carlton. Adelaide was saved from spawning ‘two nations’ within the one city by less overcrowding and the tradition of working-class ownership of the house and the block of land on which it stood. Religious dissent probably strengthened these bourgeois influences.
The politics of the periods were disturbed not so much by the fundamental differences of opinion on the ownership of wealth and the exercise of political power as by fights within the bourgeoisie for the plums and social prestige that went with a seat in the ministry of the day. In the decade of gold (1851–61), society had been divided between conservatives and liberals, between squatters and bourgeoisie, or between country and town, on such questions as land policy, the constitution, immigration, and the tariff. By 1861 the victory of the bourgeoisie was so decisive that politics changed from an argument over fundamentals to a squabble over ways and means. In the 1850s there had been the semblance of a two-party system in both New South Wales and Victoria. After the amendments to the constitution in 1857–58, the passing of the selection acts in 1861, 1862 and 1865, and the decision on tariff policy, factions replaced parties.
Political principles were forced to yield to interest. In 1872, for example, in New South Wales, Sir James Martin and John Robertson, who had fought each other savagely for the preceding fifteen years over the tariff issue, buried the tomahawk. Martin’s group had always been known as the Kookaburras, and Robertson’s as the Rosellas. Now, said Sir Henry Parkes, the laughing jackasses were seizing on Robertson to get his fine feathers to decorate the Kookaburras. With the substitution of interest and personal ambition for political principle, the debates in all the parliaments became noisy, vulgar, and personal. In the legislative assembly of Queensland in January 1872 Mr Oscar de Satgé complained that a Mr Pring had been fiddle-faddling around Brisbane ever since the session and asked what he had been doing all this time. To which Mr Pring replied ‘Making love’, and Mr Satgé retorted that he did not propose to notice any remarks that fell from the honourable member after dinner. Mr Pring then became warm, shouted invectives against all and sundry, and, as he strode from the house, seized a member by the whiskers and shouted ‘Come outside and we’ll settle it’, only to be interrupted by the Speaker, who called, ‘Sergeant, arrest that Honourable Member.’
The proceedings of all the parliaments often degenerated into uproar, as members accused each other of drunkenness, favouritism or corruption. At a time when the test of a member’s worth was his success in wheedling a school, a road, a bridge or a railway out of the government, politics became a contest between the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’, between the ‘ministerialists’ and the ‘opposition’ with the groups contending not over fundamental questions of faith or the form of society, but over a seat on the ministerial benches. In the days before payment of members, members accepted a place in the opposition as a wound to their pride, though not to their pocket. The few such as Parkes, for whom politics was a reliable source of income, earned their keep from a ministerial salary, or took commissions (bribes would be too harsh a word) from such groups as the squatters and the banks who had interests to protect in politics. The professional politician thus became a paid hireling of the bourgeoisie.
In New South Wales the three main political factions were led by Parkes, Martin, and Robertson. Of these, Henry Parkes achieved pre-eminence both with his contemporaries and posterity by his histrionic gifts, the semi-tragedy of his public life, and his association with issues such as education that touched the faith by which people lived. With the lack of charity that characterizes the comments of the upright man on the behaviour of one of the insects to whom God gave sensual lust, Alfred Deakin said of Parkes that ‘no actor ever more carefully posed for effect’, and went on to add rather harshly that Parkes ‘had always in his Mind’s eye his own portrait as that of a great man, and constantly adjusted himself to it’. But there was more to the man than the posturings of a vulgar ambition.
He was born at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, England, in 1815, the son of a small tenant farmer, and after a few years at school he took up manual work in Birmingham. In his late adolescence he served his apprenticeship as a bone and ivory turner. At the same time he began to take interest in the Chartist movement. After his marriage in 1836 he began a business on his own account, but failed so miserably that he decided in 1838 to emigrate to New South Wales. There he quickly established a reputation for success in public life and failure in business; by 1849 the man who spoke with passion on the convict system as a blot on the reputation of the colony was faced at home with bills he lacked the resources to meet. In 1850 he established a newspaper, the Empire, and in 1854 he was elected to the legislative council. In 1856 he was elected to the first legislative assembly in New South Wales, but by 1858 his financial difficulties became so acute that he was declared bankrupt, his assets then being 48,000 pounds and his liabilities 50,000. In 1870 he was in deeper water. This time his assets were 13,000 pounds and his liabilities 32,000 pounds, but he successfully outrode the storm of abuse and ridicule from all the respectable people, and two years later he became premier of New South Wales for the first time.
He was driven on by passions that were outside the ken of men who had been brought up in Melbourne provincial bourgeois rectitude. Parkes twice suffered the humiliation of bankruptcy in a society all too prone to judge a man by his solvency. His second wife had been snubbed at Government House in Sydney. He himself was often derided for his lower-class way of speaking. His passion for women was insatiable, and he was not relieved of the ravages or the pleasures of that ‘fierce and savage monster’ till he sank into the grave just before his eightieth birthday. Everything about the man was on a grand scale. His figure was huge, his eyes bulbous, his eyebrows bushy and ample; his white hair was carefully brushed back and across a commanding brow.
Parkes’s ideas were conceived on an equally grandiose scale. As a young man he advocated political democracy with an almost religious ardour. In middle age he saw himself as the man to rid the minds of both Protestant and Catholic of the superstitions implanted by parsons and priests. In old age, when the prosaic were urging federation to make meat cheaper, Parkes spoke of it as a means to make Australia the mistress of the Pacific. Yet the man remained to the end a bundle of paradoxes. He was sustained by a belief in enlightenment, yet at times grovelled before parson and priest to cadge votes in elections. The man who gave generously of heart and mind sometimes had to go down on his knees before a bank manager beseeching him not to humiliate the premier of New South Wales by refusing to honour a cheque for some trifling amount. The man who had suffered all the humiliations of the low-born during ascent to high places was driven all his life to seek flattery and recognition from those English upper classes who had so poorly used him. Parkes epitomized all the contradictions found in men whose hopes of getting on in the world were not sustained by anything firmer than their own ambitions and a vision of humanity dedicated to enlightenment and material progress. The semi-tragedy of his life sprang as much from the creed he expounded as the warring elements in his nature. It is possible, too, that the imaginative sweep of the man was smothered under the weight of debt and financial disaster. It is possible that such a fate transformed ‘his vitalizing sap into a corrupting poison’. It is possible that financial pressures changed the man of principle into an opportunist.
Other politicians did not strut and fret on the stage of public life with the same tragic grandeur as Parkes. Each was influenced by his own upbringing and conviction. Catholic politicians were sensitive to the political opinions of their hierarchy, while some Protestants were obsessed with the objective of thwarting any increase in Catholic power. Some were tariff enthusiasts; some were for education; some were for immigration; some were content to squeeze a bridge or a road or a school out of a tight-fisted treasury. All, whether Catholic or Protestant, native-born or immigrant, born to great inheritance or local boys who had made good, believed in the bourgeois ideal of getting on, in equality of opportunity, and in material progress as the forerunner of spiritual and moral progress. It was when they turned their minds to the problem of how and what to teach their children that their society was almost split asunder.
By the late 1860s it was clear that the dual system of education of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, the system where some schools were under a secular board of education and other schools were under a denominational board, had failed to provide adequate education for the children of the various colonies. The number of schools provided by either board had not kept pace with the growth of population, and the quality of the teaching in both types of schools left much to be desired. The bourgeoisie, the squatters and the working classes believed in education as a means to ensure careers open to talent as well as on the principle that knowledge was both a foe to vice and a source of power. Where all previous generations had subscribed to the slogan that the world belongs to the brave, this generation believed that in an industrial civilization the world would belong to the well informed. So all but the lunatic fringe agreed that education should be free and compulsory.
The difficulty was how to achieve this within the dual system of the national boards and denominational boards. For the denominational system was dying on its feet. But if all children were to attend national board schools, would the priests and clergy of the various denominations be able to agree on a common curriculum? The hierarchy in all the colonies insisted that all Catholic children receive a religious education, by which they meant not an hour each day, or some such plan, but a system in which classes were conducted in rooms decorated with suitable religious symbols, in which the day began and ended with prayer, in which the entire program was God-centred.
The Anglicans were just as divided on this question as they had been on all questions since the reformation. The low-church faction was inclined to believe children could be taught all that was essential to salvation by studying the Bible under the guidance of either a lay teacher or a clergyman. To ask for the continuation of denominational schools was tantamount to using public money to subsidize error, to foster amongst them a ‘system of Satanic delusion’. The high-church faction wanted to teach in their own schools, with their books and teachers, the doctrines of the Church of England, its glory and genius as a compromise between Catholic authority and the licence of dissent. The Presbyterians were equally divided, the Voluntarys supporting the movement towards secular education, and the conservatives wishing to preserve the denominational system as the one sure means of bringing up the young in the faith of their fathers. The Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Independents and others hastened to embrace secular education as their shield against popish and Anglican authoritarianism. In addition a small group campaigned for secular education as a means of bringing up the young with minds free from the superstitions, barbarous beliefs and absurdities propagated by the various religious denominations.
By 1870 it was clear that not one of the interested groups commanded a majority. In the meantime public opinion in the colonies had been affected by the decline in religious belief as well as the undignified and grotesque behaviour of the parsons and the priests. Criticism of the Old Testament by scholars had undermined the Church’s view of it as the inspired word of God, reducing it to a collection of manuscripts of unknown origin on the history of the Jewish people. The publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 had thrown doubt on the biblical story of creation. The publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871 called into question the religious assumption of the uniqueness of man poised between the angels and the brutes. Scholars began to cast doubts on the Gospels as sources for the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the Ascension. Others asserted that if God’s purpose could be achieved only by an infinity of human suffering and the condemnation of a large proportion of humanity to eternal torments in hell, then they would not accept God’s world.
To such criticism the churches replied with many voices. Some of the Protestants bravely if somewhat curiously refused to budge from the fundamentalist position that every word in the Bible was the inspired word of God. Others, bending before the scientific breeze, abandoned more and more of the teachings of their churches and took their stand on a vague deism, remaining discreetly silent about heaven and hell. Many continued to repeat the traditional justification for religion put forth by the Protestant clergy from the foundation of Australia in 1788 to their own day – namely, that morality was ineluctably connected with religious belief, that sensuality, frivolity, cupidity and political insubordination were always the close companions of atheism. Marcus Clarke, a supporter of a secular view of the world, in his Civilization Without Delusion, replied that since organized religion had demonstrably failed to lead men into the paths of duty and virtue, it was the task of the future to try morality without religion. The Anglican bishop of Melbourne asserted boldly in 1869 that the Bible had nothing to fear from science. Ten years later in Adelaide a dissenter contemplated with sadness how the church in her rashness and in her zeal for certain expressions of truth was waging a warfare against truth itself. To his regret the high Anglicans and the Catholics were ‘retreating in timidity into the dark caves of Ritualism, tenanted by the owls and bats of mediaevalism, as though too weak to bear the sunlight of truth’. He urged his fellow-believers to stand with the sunlight of heaven in their souls, upheld by their faith in God, for then nothing could harm or affright them. For in response to science and Biblical criticism some dissenters tended to urge Christians to abandon most of their beliefs, to surrender the Virgin Birth, the God-Man, the Resurrection, the Ascension, miracles, and all the sacraments of the Church, and take their stand on belief in God and the teachings of the man Jesus.
In August 1883 Chief Justice George Higinbotham of Victoria told the congregation of Scots Church, Melbourne, that the salvation of the mind of Christendom depended upon the union amongst laymen of all churches who would cast out from their own minds and from the Christian churches the spectres of old and now discredited fallacies and withdrew from all the lower standpoints of thought to a high central platform of thought. He urged belief in God, which had been ‘revealed anew to the intellect, and also to the responsive human heart, as the Father, the Friend, the Guide, and the Support of our race, and of every member of it, in the simple but profound philosophy, and also in the sublimest life, of Jesus of Nazareth, the Light of the World’.
By contrast the Church of Rome spoke with one voice and refused to abandon any of its beliefs. Believing passionately in its election by God as the divine instrument for the defence of religion, the Church surveyed the sad sight of the evils by which the human race was oppressed on every side, the widespread subversion of the primary truths on which society had been based, the obstinacy of mind that would not brook any authority, the endless disagreement, the civil strife, the insatiable craving for things perishable, and the complete forgetfulness of things eternal. She found the source of all these evils in the despising and setting aside of the holy and venerable authority of the Church. In the encyclical Inscrutabili or On the Evils affecting Modern Society, 21 April 1878, Leo XIII taught the faithful that this atrocious war against the authority of the Church, begun in the sixteenth century with the religious reformers, had as its purpose the subversion of the supernatural order and the enthroning of unaided reason. In the eyes of the Church of Rome, then, Luther and Calvin, rather than geologists, biblical scholars, Strauss, Renan, Bradlaugh, Darwin, Huxley and Marcus Clarke, were the villains of the piece. Just as some Protestants viewed the Catholics, rather than the unbelievers and the rationalists, as the mortal enemies of the supernatural, so the Roman Church viewed the Protestants as their eternal enemies and the causes of the undermining of religious belief.
Part of the price for the madness and folly of such sectarian strife was the introduction of the secular clauses in the new education acts. While priest and parson held each other responsible for the decline of religious belief, and were unable to agree on what religion should be taught in the schools, the colonial parliaments passed legislation making education free, compulsory, and secular. The first of these laws was passed by the Victorian parliament in 1872. South Australia followed suit in 1875 with an act that directed the schools to give secular instruction during regular hours but permitted them to open in the morning one quarter of an hour before the fixed time for secular instruction, for the purpose of reading portions of scripture from the Authorized or Douay version, at which attendance was not compulsory. In the same year the Queensland parliament passed an act that made education free and compulsory and prescribed that in all the schools financed by the state (hence the name ‘state schools’) there should be four hours of secular instruction in every day. New South Wales introduced free and compulsory education in 1880, with the proviso that all teaching was to be non-sectarian, but the words ‘secular instruction’ were to be held to include general religious teaching as distinguished from dogmatical or polemical theology. In 1885 the Tasmanian parliament passed an act that made education free, compulsory, and secular, but instructed the state schools to set aside an hour each week in which the children could be instructed by the ministers of their own persuasion with their parents’ consent. In 1871 the parliament of Western Australia passed the Elementary Education Act, which prescribed that no religious catechism or religious doctrine that was distinctive of any particular denomination was to be taught in any government school. In 1895 the parliament of Western Australia passed an act to abolish government assistance to denominational schools.
The bishops of the Catholic Church objected to the use of Catholic funds – taxes paid out of Catholic pockets – for the establishment throughout the land of a system of education that not many Catholics could safely make use of, and that they fiercely believed was calculated to sap the foundations of Christianity. The faith of Catholic children educated in state schools was enfeebled; their manners became rough and irreverent; they had little sense of respect and genteelness; the playgrounds of the state schools were seedbeds of immorality and vice. The priests looked on the future of such wild, uncurbed children with misgivings. Such children, the bishops predicted, would plunge into darkness and make a shipwreck of the faith.
So the bishops campaigned for the renewal of state aid to each denomination, in the meantime raising money from their own congregations to build and equip schools. To assist in this work the bishops recruited members of the religious orders from Ireland. In the choice between the faith and possibly a substandard secular education, the bishops chose the faith. The Protestants remained as suspicious as ever of Catholic attempts to revive state aid to religious denominations. They campaigned in every colony for the teaching of the Bible in the state schools. But the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church warned the faithful that such a change would lead to a yet greater evil than unbelief, the Protestantizing of state education. So those fears and suspicions dividing Catholic and Protestant that had paved the way for the introduction of secular education also preserved secular education in succeeding generations.
After the introduction of free, compulsory, and secular education there were three types of schools in all the colonies. The Protestant schools educated the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie in the cities, of the merchants, bankers, traders, manufacturers, publicans, and professional men, the sons and daughters of the squatters and the wealthy farmers, together with a few talented children whom they bought with scholarships. Their schools were modelled on the English public schools and designed for the education of boys and girls to serve God in church, state, and the professions – to produce that upright man who feared God and eschewed evil and at the same time was dedicated to the service of the wordly aspirations of the British people.
By contrast the Catholics provided only a few schools for the children of the bourgeoisie, the squatters, and the professional classes because their numbers came from the petty bourgeoisie and the working classes. To educate the children of those classes in Catholic schools the Church raised money from the faithful and used members of the religious orders as teachers. In such schools priests, brothers, nuns, and laymen presented a view of man and the meaning of his life, as well as a version of human history, quite different from what was taught in the Protestant schools. State schools taught a syllabus prescribed by the colonial department of education. The Protestant and the state school boy or girl grew up to believe in the contribution of the British to the freedom of men and the progress of the world; the Catholic child grew up nursing in his mind the melancholy history of the Irish people and a conviction that the British by great barbarity and cruelty had contributed to the oppression and degradation of the ancestors of his people in Ireland. The new education acts also continued the tendency to centralize the administration of the colonies. As neither party to the great debate on education was prepared to entrust the appointment of teachers, or the choice of syllabus and textbooks, to a local committee for fear of domination by one sect or another, control was vested in a department of education, responsible to the minister in the capital city of each colony. So the sectarian controversy contributed to both centralization and conformity. It also contributed to the timidity and that air of taboo that rapidly surrounded all controversial subjects, for as agreement between the contending groups was impossible, the education departments taught a history, an ethic, and a religion that were so vague and pallid as not to encourage the interest of the boys and girls in the great questions of life.
This shying away from the great questions of life occurred at a time when two quite different views of the nature of man and the meaning of life were taking shape. On such questions the children educated in those schools would be called on to make up their minds. On the one hand the rationalists were thundering against the hydra-headed monster of hypocrisy, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance that followed religious belief as night followed day. On the other hand the Pope was thundering against the evils of unbelief, which, he predicted, would subvert the primary truths on which society was based and promote endless sources of disagreement; which in turn would lead to civil strife, ruthless war, that insatiable craving for things perishable and a complete forgetfulness of things eternal. The rationalists called on mankind to Ecraser l’infâme; the priests warned that without Christ mankind would be destroyed.
While Pope, priest, and parson were expatiating on the evils affecting modern society from the spread of unbelief, in 1878 the members of the Seamen’s Union raised fundamental questions on the composition and organization of society in the Australian colonies. The union informed its members that the owners of the Australian Union Steamship Navigation Company had been quietly replacing European members of their crews with Chinese: ‘In this what will be to them a gigantic struggle, they appeal confidently to their brother seamen to refuse most decidedly to ship Chinese in their places.’ So on 18 November the seamen, cooks and stewards walked off the ships of the Australian Union Steamship Navigation Company at Circular Quay, Sydney. The union was claiming a voice not only on wages and conditions of employment but on the composition of society. When the men agreed to return to work on 2 January, 1879, the company undertook to reduce the number of Chinese on their ships within three months of that date.
Four years later the colonies in eastern Australia were confronted with the problem of relations with the outside world. In April 1883, exasperated by the reluctance of the British government to take action to forestall a German annexation of eastern New Guinea, the Premier of Queensland, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, hoisted the British flag at Port Moresby. The action was disavowed by the Colonial Secretary, Lord Derby, who firmly declined to satisfy the greed of the Queensland sugar planters for cheap labour by increasing British commitments in the Pacific. At the same time the governments of Victoria and New South Wales were afraid that the French proposed to annex the New Hebrides. All these governments were also concerned with the havoc caused by convicts escaping from the French prison island in New Caledonia. To discuss these problems the premiers of the Australian colonies agreed to hold an intercolonial convention in Sydney in November 1883. At this convention, the new Premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, proposed that a federal Australasian council be created to deal with the marine defences of Australasia beyond territorial limits, as well as the relations of Australasia with the islands of the Pacific, the prevention of the influx of criminals, the regulation of quarantine, and such other matters of general Australasian interest. But the federal council was a dead letter from the start, partly because of its lack of administrative powers, but mainly because of the refusal of New South Wales to join. Just as the confrontation with the outside world was driving the colonies towards some form of union, the confrontation between the colonies was exacerbating the tendencies to a colonial provincialism. After James Service, the Premier of Victoria, returned to Melbourne from the intercolonial convention, he said at a banquet in his honour that he had noticed in Sydney the most intense jealousy in respect to Melbourne and the Melbourne people, and that Sydney had not forgiven Victoria or Queensland for running away from the mother colony. When this speech was reported in Sydney, feeling ran high. In the legislative assembly of New South Wales one man declared amidst cheers and hurrahs that New South Wales was as far above Victoria as heaven was above earth, while Sir John Robertson contemptously described Victoria as a ‘cabbage patch’, and a Mr Cameron talked of the insult conveyed to the Speaker, to the House, and to the people of New South Wales by the flippant and claptrap utterances of the gentleman who was for the time being premier of Victoria.
A month before the Australian seamen raised the question of coloured labour in Australia four policemen, Kennedy, Lonigan, Scanlon, and Mclntyre, set out from Mansfield in north-eastern Victoria to arrest Ned Kelly, Joe Byrne, Dan Kelly, and Steve Hart, for horse and cattle stealing. On 26 October, 1878, when the police confronted the bushrangers on the Stringybark Creek, Ned Kelly shot and killed Kennedy, Lonigan and Scanlon. McIntyre escaped to Mansfield to give the alarm. Immediately the colony was in an uproar. To the squatters, the bourgeoisie, and all the forces of law, order, and respectability, Kennedy Lonigan, and Scanlon were three brave men who lost their lives while endeavouring to capture a band of armed criminals. But from the day of the outrage a legend began to grow amongst the cocky farmers, the fossickers for gold, the descendants of the convicts and the poverty-stricken Irish exiles, who, like Ned, had tried but failed to earn a living by lawful means in that hard and bitter country. It was said that Ned, like Robin Hood, was battling only to deprive the rich of their wealth and give it to the poor. So the man who killed the three constables in cold blood was apotheosized into a folk hero who would humble the proud, take the mighty from their seat, and send the rich empty away.
After Ned and his gang robbed the National Bank of Benalla in December 1878, and the Bank of New South Wales at Jerilderie, thirty miles on the New South Wales side of the Murray, he boasted that his men had never harmed a woman or robbed a poor man. But by one of those ironies in human affairs it was one of the little men whom he befriended who brought them down. In June 1880 the gang occupied the hotel at Glenrowan, near Wangaratta, in northern Victoria. Ned, puffed up with pride and insolence by his previous successes, had conceived the mad plan of destroying a train bringing the police and black-trackers to hunt for him. The gang tore up a stretch of track shortly before the train on which the police were travelling was due. While Ned and the other members of the gang were preparing a ghastly wake for their victims, a schoolteacher slipped out of the hotel and stopped the train in time. The police surrounded the hotel and set fire to it. Steve Hart, Dan Kelly and Joe Byrne were burnt to death, but Ned, mad as ever, put on his homemade armour and shot it out with the police till a bullet brought him down. He was brought to Melbourne, tried, and hanged on 11 November, 1880, when, according to legend, his last words were ‘Such is life.’
The memory of him lived on. The squatters and the bourgeoisie attributed the Kellys and their outrages to the selection acts, which had afforded opportunities for people to take up land in remote districts where religious and educational influences could not penetrate. The result was a race of godless, lawless men and women, half bandits, half cattle-stealers, and wholly vicious. But to the dispossesed in both town and country Ned was a hero. In an age in which the gods of the old religions were toppling to their ruins, Ned, or the idea of Ned, was an image in which men could believe, because his life and death symbolized the experience of the native-born, their unwillingness to accept the morality of the English, and their groping for a new morality and a new way of life. Ned was hanged in Melbourne gaol on the eve of a period in which Australians fumbled towards a secular creed to replace the creeds of organized religion, towards a statement that would sum up their experience of just one hundred years of European civilization in Australia. That was the task to which the radicals and the nationalists addressed themselves in the period between 1883 and 1900.