Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  Thomas Muir, the last of the Martyrs, was a notable and promising young man, the son of a hop merchant from Glasgow and admitted in his youth to Glasgow University. He became a counsel on behalf of the poor and joined the Society of the Friends of the People. In early 1793 he was charged with sedition, but released, upon which he went to France to attempt to persuade the leaders of the revolution not to execute Louis XVI. The day after he returned to Scotland, he was arrested, imprisoned in Edinburgh, tried again and sentenced to fourteen years transportation. Lord Braxfield, who had also tried Skirving, declared in his judgment that ‘the British constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better. Yet Mr Muir has gone among the ignorant country people and told them Parliamentary Reform was absolutely necessary for preserving their liberty.’

  Margarot, his wife and the other Scottish Martyrs, except Gerrald, travelled to Port Jackson on the Surprize. It had been one of Camden, Calvert and King’s overcrowded and stinking death ships in the Second Fleet, but now that England was at war with revolutionary France and many potential criminals were absorbed by the army and navy, there were fewer than a hundred convicts on board, and the Margarots and the others could travel as cabin passengers. But some falling out between Margarot and the others occurred over an alleged plan by them to capture the ship and take it to France. Later, the authorities would dismiss the accusation, but it left some bad blood amongst the Martyrs.

  On arrival in Sydney, Margarot and the others were permitted to live in their own cottages exempt from labour, but Dr Margarot urged Lieutenant-Governor Grose to pardon him, claiming he was entitled to ‘the restoration of my freedom . . . inasmuch as I conceive my sentence to be fulfi lled on my arrival here, that sentence being transportation and not slavery, the latter unknown to our laws, and directly contrary to the British Constitution as it was established in the revolution of 1688’.

  Despite failing to gain his desired freedom, Margarot got on well with Grose, and also Governor Hunter. Governor King he disliked. He told King that he intended to report to London on his behaviour, a fact calculated to make King mistrust him. He often entertained the radical Irish who would arrive later in the decade and in the early years of the new century. When King seized the outraged Margarot’s papers, he found amongst them evidence of conspiracy with the Irish, denunciations of colonial avarice, and a forecast of Australia succeeding America as the world’s chief post-colonial power. Margarot and his wife would ultimately be sent to Norfolk Island with other ‘incendiaries’.

  After two years in Sydney, having acquired a farm at Hunters Hill, Thomas Muir escaped with the help of the first mate of an American ship, the Otter of Boston. He reached Vancouver Island where he boarded a Spanish ship to go into exile in Europe. The Spanish vessel was attacked by a British warship, and a cannonball smashed Muir’s left cheekbone and damaged both eyes, and he was recaptured. The French government arranged for Muir’s release, and he arrived at Bordeaux in November 1797, went to Paris and campaigned from there with Tom Paine, author of The Rights of Man, for parliamentary reform in Britain. But he never recovered from his injuries and died at Chantilly on 26 January 1799.

  Skirving had bought a small farm in Sydney, but both he and John Gerrald were in shaky health, and nine days after Gerrald expired of tuberculosis in 1796, nursed by the generous-hearted Thomas Palmer, Skirving fell to dysentery. Palmer would himself perish on the Spanish island of Guam on his way home to Britain after his term of exile expired. But Margarot’s seditious house remained at the colony’s heart.

  UNHINGEING A GOVERNOR

  Governor John Hunter, Phillip’s friend, suffered as much as anyone from the distance of New South Wales from England and the low priority it inevitably had with a British government struggling with post-revolutionary France. As much as any governor he was subject to sniping reports from various citizens, but none could snipe so efficaciously as John Macarthur.

  Macarthur had been appointed by Major Grose, before Hunter’s arrival as governor in Sydney, to the post of Inspector of Public Works in New South Wales, and Hunter made friends with him and confided in him until he experienced the fury of Macarthur’s unquiet heart when he tried to restrict the trading activities of Rum Corps offi cers. Captain Paterson, Commandant of the New South Wales Corps, was a youngish man who would become greatly weakened and prematurely aged by a duel he would fight with Macarthur, but despite that, Hunter discovered that he could not rely upon the military, and found it impossible to control its liquor monopoly and trading.

  Suffering barely disguised disrespect from the military in town, Hunter found his relief in explorations around Sydney, and in sending back specimens of Australian fauna to Sir Joseph Banks.

  In 1799, a dispatch arrived from the Duke of Portland, the Colonial Secretary, recalling him. The sense that he had failed to control the military gentlemen’s avarice weighed heavily on him. After returning to England, while serving on half-pay, he wrote a vindication of his administration. In line with the custom of promotion by seniority he became a rear admiral in 1807 and a vice-admiral in 1810. He would die in 1821, but many of his drawings of flora and fauna remain in Australia, at the National Library.

  THE HEARTSORE IRISH

  As D’Arcy Wentworth served on Norfolk Island with his convict woman and his sickly son, his wealthy cousin, Earl Fitzwilliam, was sent to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in 1795. He was greeted by progressives with rapture, for it was known he intended to advance the Emancipation of Catholics and make peace with the Irish Whig leader Henry Gratton. Those comfortable with the divided state of the nation fi ercely opposed to Emancipation, petitioned London asking for Fitzwilliam’s recall. With their powerful connections in Westminster, they were able to achieve it. Hence, the cancellation of Earl Fitzwilliam’s warrant and his replacement by a hard-liner, Earl Camden, showed the Irish progressives that justice and independence could be established in Ireland only by force. The Irish people of all classes who formed a crowd all the way to the Dublin Quays, men and women torn between anger at Westminster and respect for Fitzwilliam, and who saw the earl departing on his ship back to England, knew that a cataclysm was coming.

  The peasantry, the Gaelic-speaking masses of the countryside, saw rebellion as a chance to adjust the land system in their favour, and, inevitably, to destroy the Protestant Ascendancy. They were the Croppies, the ready foot soldiers of revolution. What was of particular alarm to the British establishment in Ireland was the likelihood that Napoleon might send an army to reinforce any uprising, and that thus Britain would find itself with the enemy not only on the Continent but to its west.

  In the countryside remotely placed landlords found their peasantry, many of them future Australian convicts, boldly cutting down their trees to make pikes for the coming adjustment of justice.

  But Ninety-Eight’s dark season came,

  And Irish Hearts Were Sore,

  The Pitch-Cap, shears and triangle,

  The patient folk outbore.

  The Blacksmith thought of Erin

  And found he’d work to do.

  ‘I’ll forge some steel for freedom,’

  Said Pat O’Donoghue.

  The early success of the uprising can only be briefly dealt with here, but in Wicklow and Wexford there were pitched battles, and serious action in Ulster. When all seemed lost, after the climactic battle of Vinegar Hill near Enniscorthy in Wexford, a French army landed in County Mayo at Killala, joined up with the United Irishmen, and enjoyed some victories.

  When the French ultimately surrendered they were treated well. But the United Irishmen of Mayo suffered the same excesses of torment as had been employed in the rest of Ireland. In a melee of arrests and beatings, impalings, summary executions and transportations, no one checked too closely into the exact culpability of this or that man. The army butchered anyone wearing a brown Croppy coat found within several miles of any field of action. When the veteran general Lord Cornwal
lis arrived in Dublin in June 1798 to replace Camden, he was appalled by the excesses of violence his predecessor had tolerated. He wrote to a friend in London of ‘the numberless murders that are hourly committed by our people without any process or examination whatever . . . Our friends . . . and their folly in making it a religious war, added to the ferocity of our troops who delight in murder, most powerfully counteract all plans of conciliation.’ It was decided by Cornwallis, rather than by London, that clemency must be conceded to men who surrendered. Clemency, however, in many cases would involve imprisonment in typhus-haunted gaols and hulks, and ultimate transportation to New South Wales.

  Who were these inflammatory Irish transported to the other side of the world? On the Minerva of 1800 and the Anne of 1801 were a number of ‘prominent leaders’ of the 1798 uprising. On the Anne, for example, perhaps more than one hundred of one hundred and thirty-seven convicts were guilty of political crimes, at least as they saw it. King called them ‘one hundred and thirty-seven of the most desperate and diabolical characters that could be selected throughout that kingdom, together with a Catholic priest of most notorious, seditious, and rebellious principles’. Forty-one were listed as United Irishmen, seven as possessing arms or pikes, four as having been engaged in treasonable, rebellious or seditious practices, three as being involved in unlawful oaths, two as violating the Insurrection Acts, two as being rebel leaders or captains and one of fomenting rebellion. Vaguer offences were also punished, such as those attaching to one Hugh Dolan, ‘being from house, a most dangerous man’ and to James Delahunty, who was found to be an ‘idle and disorderly person and drinking seditious toasts’. Hugh Mohan was found out late at night singing treasonable songs and could give no account for his behaviour.

  Thomas Langan from Glin in County Limerick, who arrived in Sydney on the Anne, was one of the best-known rebels in the province of Munster, where he went by the nom-de-guerre of Captain Steel. His shipmates on the Anne included the United Irish captains Philip Cunningham and Manus Sheehy. Another leader from the Limerick-Kerry border was Patrick Galvin who had arrived on Friendship in 1800, along with James Meehan, a young man in his twenties, a surveyor, who would later do great service to the British government in triangulating and surveying the earth of New South Wales.

  Philip Gidley King, who became governor of New South Wales in 1800, described the Irish Croppy convicts as ‘satanic’. And the Reverend Marsden, Low Church clergyman and high-toned magistrate who arrived in the colony in 1794 to work beside the Reverend Johnson, ultimately wrote a report to the London Missionary Society in 1807, declaring, ‘The low Irish convicts are an extraordinary race of beings whose minds are depraved beyond all conception and their whole thoughts employed on mischief.’ As for the United Irish leadership, ‘leading men in their own country’, they were still very dangerous towards a proper government and ‘most of them are very wild and eccentric. The advantages of superior education have not been able to correct this part of their national character.’ By that stage, the very mercantile, land-owning Reverend Samuel Marsden had personally experienced the rebellious intentions of the United Irish.

  Father Dixon of Wexford, the epicentre of the rebellion, was condemned to death by the British army in May 1798, but was saved on the intervention of several leading Protestant loyalists who said he had protected Protestants. His sentence was commuted to transportation. His cousin, a shipmaster named Thomas Dixon, was one of the rebel leaders, and Father Dixon seems to have been guilty by virtue of kinship.

  The assumption amongst the authorities was that the priests were dangerous, but in fact the priests were generally against any United Irish uprising in New South Wales, because they believed it would be suicidal. Father Harold, a robust 55-year-old who had written United Irish verse until told to stop by his archbishop had always preached non-violence and restraint but was arrested, his captors ignoring three orders from Dublin Castle, the English headquarters in Ireland, for his release. On the summer evening of his arrival in New South Wales aboard the Minerva from Cork, in January 1800, Harold entertained his Protestant clergyman host by singing ‘The Exile of Erin’, while United Irish prisoners on the beach below cried ‘Encore!’

  Still opposed to violence, he told Surgeon Balmain in August 1800, in the last weeks of Hunter’s governorship, that there were some plans afoot among the Irish of New South Wales to rebel, though he did not reveal the identity of the plotters. William Cox, a lieutenant critical of English excesses in Ireland, who had also sailed on Minerva, wrote to Samuel Marsden, the magistrate at Parramatta, reporting his suspicions, and Marsden and Richard Atkins went down to Sydney to tell Governor Hunter who immediately started an enquiry led by the judge-advocate.

  The hearing took place in early September and the first witness was Father Harold. Although he said that the planned uprising was well advanced, he believed he could restrain the convicts by moral persuasion and would not name the leader; he declared he would not bring any man by the neck before the authorities unless it were a person who first squandered a thousand lives. He was committed to gaol for withholding the truth. It was assumed he had heard of the plot in the confessional, since under canonical law a priest thus informed may warn of a coming threat, but must not identify the person in whom it resides.

  Amongst the names that emerged as potential leaders from witnesses who turned King’s evidence were those of Joseph Holt, an eloquent rebel leader from Wicklow, transported on Minerva, and Margarot, the Scottish Martyr. It seemed that even during the enquiry the plot was going ahead. One witness said Holt had conferred with two other rebel leaders in a barn at Captain Cox’s property at Canterbury, to the south-west of Sydney. Evidence emerged at the enquiry that Holt had waited for a while before committing himself, but it was alleged he then suggested that he lead one party and that a United Irishman named William Alcock, a former British officer, lead another. On the basis of information given by Harold, the authorities were able to track down Bryan Fury, a blacksmith from Longford who also had arrived on the Minerva and was said to have made pikes, secretly filing down hinges to make their heads. But none were found in Fury’s possession.

  Despite the enquiry, the concept for the rebellion remained steady: to gather during Saturday night, 4 March, and on Sunday morning to attack the church in Parramatta during the service, overpowering the soldiers whose arms would be stacked or at their barracks. But one of the proposed leaders, Quinlan, had been found drunk at dawn and was arrested, and Francis King, a deserter from a militia in Cork, took over command. In the uncertainty, not enough turned up to storm the church.

  A further ten supposed leaders were arrested—not all of them United Irishmen, or at least not transported for that offence. The authorities persuaded one to turn informer, a young man called John Connell. A new round of floggings was ordered. Father Harold was made to place his hand on the flogging tree when the punishments were carried out at Parramatta, and Joseph Holt was subject to the same order. Amongst those sentenced to punishment varying from 100 to 500 lashes was the young rebel lieutenant Patrick Galvin, and United Irishman Maurice Fitzgerald.

  Paddy Galvin said during his flogging, wrote Marsden, that though he was a young man, ‘he would have died upon the spot before he would tell a single sentence. He was taken down three times, punished upon his back, and also on his bottom when he could receive no more on his back. Galvin was just in the same mood when taken to the hospital as he was when first tied up, and continued the same this morning.’

  Though to Marsden the problem was Galvin’s undiminished defiance, the erosion that befell Galvin and Fitzgerald in the physical sense was detailed by Holt with nationalist admiration.

  The place they flogged them their arms pulled round a large tree and their breasts squeezed against the trunk so the men had no power to cringe . . . there was two floggers, Richard Rice and John Johnson, the hangman from Sydney. Rice was [a] left-handed man, and Johnson was right-handed, so they stood at each side and I never saw two
threshers in a barn move their strokes more handier than these two man-killers did. I was to the leeward of the floggers . . . the flesh and skin blew in my face as it shook off the cats. Fitzgerald received his three hundred lashes. Dr Mason—I will never forget him—he used to go feel his pulse, and he smiled, and said, ‘This man will tire before he will fail—go on.’ . . . during this time Fitzgerald was getting his punishment he never gave so much as a word—only one, and that was saying, ‘Don’t strike me on the neck, flog me fair.’ When he was let loose, two of the constables went and took hold of him by the arms to keep him in the cart. I was standing by. He said to them, ‘Let me go.’ He struck both of them with his elbows in the pit of the stomach and knocked them both down, and then stepped in the cart. I heard Dr Mason say that man was strong enough to bear two hundred more. Next was tied up Paddy Galvin, a young boy about sixteen years of age. He was ordered to get three hundred lashes. He got one hundred on the back, and you could see his backbone between the shoulder blades. Then the doctor ordered him to get another hundred on his bottom. He got it, and then his haunches were in such a jelly that the doctor ordered him to be flogged on the calves of his legs. He got a hundred there and as much as a whimper he never gave. They asked him if he would tell where the pikes were hid. He said he did not know, and would not tell. ‘You may as well hang me now,’ he said, ‘for you’ll never get any music from me so.’ They put him in the cart and took him to the hospital.