Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  At Toongabbie Johnston was told the rebels were on the hill above, behind the house of Dr Martin Mason, who had been the offi ciating surgeon at many a flogging. He had only a small part of the New South Wales Corps with him. But he relied on the fact that his men were at least trained soldiers, some of them having had experience in other British regiments. So he set out to flank the Irish with an advance guard of five soldiers and six to eight local inhabitants, members of the Loyal Association, while he led twenty troops and twelve armed Loyalists up the hill. They found no one there, and marched on through a sweltering summer day. He pursued the rebels for sixteen kilometres and then heard from a mounted trooper that they were only two kilometres further on. The trooper rode ahead, waving a white handkerchief, and caught up to the rebels, calling out to them and telling them that the governor was on his way to talk to them. They did not believe him and took the flints out of his pistol and sent him back. Johnston then sent Father Dixon, whom he had brought with him from Parramatta, to talk to the rebels, but they would not listen.

  Johnston and his trooper galloped forward and called to the Irish, most of them wearing shirtsleeves this sweltering day, and asked to speak to their leaders. They invited him to come amongst them. He replied that he was within firing distance of them and that he wanted to avoid bloodshed.

  ‘Death or liberty and a ship to take us home,’ was the reply, but in the end two rebels came down the hill. One of them, Cunningham, took off his hat, either as a gesture of obeisance or equality of status. Again Father Dixon cried out for an end to bloodshed. At that moment, as Quartermaster Laycock with the rest of the troops came into view, Johnston pulled a pistol from his sash and put it to the head of one of the leaders, who were innocent enough to think they were operating under a parley and some vestige of British honour in which, despite all, they believed. The trooper did the same with the other leader. Retreating with his two captives, Johnston called on his troops to begin firing, and shooting broke out on both sides. Nine rebels were immediately killed, and many wounded.

  Most rebels, however, escaped in the following moonless night and some remained at large well into March. But Philip Cunningham was killed. A United Irish account credibly enough argues that some of the volunteers of the Loyal Association shot Cunningham and his fellow leader, William Johnson, after Major Johnston had left them in the care of Quartermaster Laycock. Johnston himself tellingly reported, ‘I never in my life saw men behave better than those under my command, and the only fault I had to find with them was their being too fond of blood. I saved the lives of six miserable wretches that the soldiers would have butchered, if I had not presented my pistol at their heads and swore I would shoot them if they attempted to kill them in cold blood.’

  For to make up the numbers of the Loyal Association, many ‘volunteers’ were convicts serving time, and there was a notable lack of quick pardons for them after the uprising, perhaps as a result of their brutality during it.

  Many of the first ten rebels who appeared before court claimed that they had been coerced into taking part in the uprising. Nevertheless, all ten were sentenced to death, to be hung in chains. Marsden noted that four of them were Protestants and two Englishmen. They were executed at the place of their violation, and at Castle Hill, Parramatta and Sydney. Two of the convicts in charge of the bullock carts who were ordered to drive the condemned men to the scaffold went on strike and each received twenty-five lashes.

  Other rebels were condemned to flogging or sent to labour in the gaol gang. A number of ‘ironed prisoners’ in the gaol gang at Parramatta memorialised the governor with their thanks on account of ‘your unprecedented clemency’ extended to them—‘the deluded people distinguished by the name Croppies’.

  It is undeniable that a moderating liberal influence operated in King—he was not as remiss or brutal as Earl Camden had been in Ireland. It is hard to this day to say whether that constitutes high or low praise. In the meantime the Irish leadership, dispersed from Coal River (Newcastle) to Norfolk Island, were not in a position to play with the concept of another uprising. The frustrated idea, however, abided amongst humbler convicts.

  A STATE OF SLAVES

  Governor King would have sent many of the Irish to Norfolk Island except that there were plans now to abandon it and establish a convict settlement at the Coal River, a hundred and twenty kilometres north of Sydney. It would be called Newcastle. A party led by Lieutenant Charles Menzies left from Sydney in late March on two ships with thirty-four prisoners and ten soldiers. The naturalist Frederick Bauer and the ornithologist George Cayley also went, driven by scientifi c thirst. Amongst the notable United Irishmen sentenced there by the Parramatta bench of magistrates were William Maum and Clarence McCarty, the latter a lawyer. They had suffered a destiny like Joseph Holt, who was sent to Norfolk Island despite its coming (and temporary) disbandment, aboard the Betsey, and impressed its captain as a gentleman, ‘very finely dressed on landing, in a new blue coat with a black velvet collar, like a gentleman should be—which he was, every inch of him’.

  English convicts from the Coromandel were mixed in with the Irish at Coal River, but that did not stop Irish disaffection, and six ringleaders of a possible uprising were imprisoned, and two of them sent back to Sydney to face sentences of flogging, after which they were to labour in an iron gang, but with solitary confinement at night. One United Irishman fled to the bush to escape the punishment and died in the hills around the Coal (later, Hunter) River.

  The Irish all thought, under the doctrine of Tom Paine and other radicals, that they were slaves. Their masters thought they were miscreants. There could be no meeting of minds.

  Many agreed with the Irish convicts. Lieutenant James Tuckey of the Calcutta, an Irishman who understood where the rebellions were springing from, wrote a letter to Henry Dundas, now Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that the regulations which had been both salutary and necessary in the setting up of the colony, ‘are now become the most severe grievances’. Tuckey was a friend of Sir Henry Browne Hayes and Maurice Margarot, critics of King’s style of autocracy. Copies of the pamphlet of Tuckey’s address to Dundas arrived in New South Wales by 1805 or so. William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner and founder of the London Missionary Society of which Samuel Marsden was the manifestation in New South Wales, could not concur with his protégé’s view of things—that close regulation of the convicts was essential—and agreed with Tuckey that the colony was being run on a basis of de facto slavery.

  Jospeh Holt, too, wrote of convict labour in the colony in terms that supplied ammunition to the reformers.

  I saw, at the distance of about half a mile, about fifty men at work, and from their appearance, thought they were dressed with nankeen jackets but, to my surprise, I found it to be the colour of their skin . . . they all worked naked, only loose trousers to cover their parts, so I looked at them with the eye of pity. These men were working with large hoes, about nine inches deep and eight inches wide, a small handle about as thick as the handle of a shovel, and they turned up the ground somewhat like it would be dug with spades and left to rot in winter time. Six men to an acre. In the day’s work, they can’t wear any shoes when at work, nor any clothes on them in the heat of the day.

  The treatment of the dead also appalled liberal sentiment. The body of William Johnson, the United Irish leader, hung in chains from a high tree on the road out of Parramatta, subject to putrefaction and attacks by birds. The naval captain William Kent’s wife, Elizabeth, sister of John Hunter, pleaded with Governor King to order the burial of Johnson and the other ‘martyrs hanged in the sacred cause of liberty’.

  If it were accepted literally that they were hung in pursuit of liberty, the concept that they had been slaves was, for many minds, validated. One English convict, John Grant, had been educated along with Coleridge and Charles Lamb at Christ’s Hospital. He had been sentenced to death for firing at a solicitor who frustrated his attempts to win the hand of the daughter of Lord Dud
ley. After a petition from his sister to the daughters of George III, he was reprieved on the eve of his execution and arrived in New South Wales on the Coromandel in May 1804. He fell under the influence of Sir Henry Browne Hayes, and frequently wrote of the excesses of Governor King, particularly his brutalities against convicts. The idea he had got from others in conversations around Sydney was that the Irish had rebelled because they had been compelled to work as slaves, ‘contrary to the laws of the English Magna Carta . . . and that an English gentleman, peace loving, to whom liberty is dear, fi nds himself confounded and amazed to see a system of slavery introduced into a colony of his unhappy compatriots’.

  ‘In the name of God, sir,’ he asked a loyalist naval lieutenant in 1805, ‘what right had this country to seize them and make them work by force? What a horrible slave state that is! There is no justification for it either in justice or politics; on the contrary a wise government should try giving land to them and offering assistance, to make them forget the past, and by such humane and just contact make what were enemies, friends, and [that] would help the Britannic government towards the prosperity of the free settlers in these vast tracts of land.’

  He was deported to Norfolk Island in June 1805 and continued to criticise King and, later, Captain Piper, the Norfolk commandant. He was fi nally banished to the nearby uninhabited Phillip Island as punishment. After four months of living alone and coming close to starvation, he was brought back to Norfolk Island by Piper but was a shell of himself. Returned to Sydney when he received his conditional pardon in 1805 he courageously returned to the theme of slavery: ‘This Noble Charter [Magna Carta] is here violated.’

  Returned to Sydney in 1808 with his health restored, he later became a chaplain in Newcastle. He had a plough especially made and hired oxen from Sir Henry Browne Hayes to avoid the necessity of accepting assigned convicts or submitting men to the grubbing hoe on his own land. Otherwise, he said, ‘I could never have called myself a friend of liberty again.’ He would ultimately be absolutely pardoned by Governor Macquarie and in 1811 returned to England.

  But he and other friends of liberty in Britain and Australia had released into the air the idea that the convicts were slaves, not in a metaphoric but literal sense. It would become a hard proposition to combat, even though there were obvious differences between slavery and convict transportation which defenders of the system would point out. The offensive concept to many was that as Britain was preparing to legislate the death of one form of slavery, a de facto white slavery seemed to operate in the penal colonies.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE PERTURBATOR

  Lord Hobart, the latest Secretary for War and the Colonies, had already written, in a dispatch to Governor King dated 30 November 1803, that ‘the gratification I experienced from the satisfactory view of the situation of the colony is in a great degree alloyed by the unfortunate differences which have so long subsisted between you and the military officers in the colony . . . and which, I am sorry to observe, have latterly extended to the commander of His Majesty’s ship, Glatton.’

  King did not get a chance to acknowledge receipt of this less than glowing letter of appreciation for his efforts until August 1804. So it was not the Irish who brought King down, but the officers. It is not known if he really wanted an ealier vague request to be granted leave to return to England to be so promptly accepted.

  Lord Hobart, described as ‘amiable and exigent’, had done two stints as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and it was upon this skilled but relatively colourless fellow that all the great passion of New South Wales was being unloaded by offi cers, rebels and the governor’s besieged supporters. No wonder King had started to drink too much, for his dispatches often display a sense of futility.

  His long-running enmity with the officer corps was reaching a climax. King wanted to begin a government store where settlers could buy goods without a scandalous mark-up, putting a stop, he hoped, to what he called ‘the late commissioned hucksters’. He came down hard on John Harris, a licensed victualler and retailer of spirituous liquors, who gave spirits to two convicts for their week’s ration of salt meat from the public stores. Harris was deprived of his licence and all his liquors were to be ‘staved’, that is, smashed. But Harris was Macarthur’s man, and the staved barrels belonged to him. Macarthur wrote to England to complain to a range of officials, and urged Colonel Paterson to do the same. Consequently, King rapidly developed a detestation of Macarthur which was matched only by his detestation of the Irish politicals. By 5 November 1801 he complained to Downing Street that Macarthur had incited Paterson to write to Sir Joseph Banks complaining that ‘my too great economy had occasioned the present scarcity’. He had also bullied the pliant Paterson to write to General Brownrigg at the War Office, King said. Macarthur had led the campaign to rid the officer corps and the colony of Hunter for trying to do away with the bankrupting effects of Rum Corps control of trade. Why shouldn’t he achieve the same with King?

  Yet the kindly Mrs King and Mrs Elizabeth Paterson, and similarly Macarthur’s wife, Elizabeth, were all close and cherished friends, reliant on each other for ladylike society, not least in the new drawing room in Government House, Parramatta, and all of them collaborated in the founding of the Female Orphan School. Perhaps Macarthur thought women operated on a less fraught plain.

  Macarthur himself drove the argument with the governor over freedom of trade and sanctity of merchandise and was not above savaging his own side. He became angry at Paterson for keeping up contact and conversation with King and thus standing in the way of Macarthur’s attempts to have the governor ‘sent to Coventry’. Indeed when the governor invited the garrison officers to dinner, only four failed to turn up, a fact which made Macarthur more implacable and more combative with Colonel Paterson. Gradually, over months, the officers other than Paterson began to shun the governor’s table. King felt he could not court-martial Macarthur for his behaviour towards him because most of the men who would sit on the panel ‘were so far compromised’.

  Manically, or perhaps maniacally enraged when crossed, Macarthur provoked a duel with Paterson, his superior officer, by leaking a letter Mrs Paterson had sent to Mrs Macarthur, and the details of a conversation Mrs Paterson had had with his Elizabeth at the Paterson house. The duel took place in Parramatta and—against the rules of duelling—Macarthur was permitted to load his own pistols. He won the toss to fire first against his commanding officer, did so and severely wounded him in the right shoulder. Paterson could not return fire and by the time his carriage got him back to Sydney he was in a desperate condition from loss of blood.

  After some delays, King, who would have liked to challenge ‘the perturbator’ Macarthur to a duel but felt it inappropriate to his vice-regal status, subjected Captain Macarthur to house arrest on the grounds that the King’s Regulations forbade one officer to challenge another under pain of being cashiered. However Macarthur would not give the necessary securities for keeping the peace and insisted on a general court martial, compelling King to ‘judge it necessary and indispensable for the tranquillity of the colony and regiment to direct that officer to be sent to England . . . Captain Macarthur had quarrelled with Colonel Paterson because he chose to pay me that attention which a friendship of ten years required.’

  Indeed, King’s allies fulminated against Captain Macarthur in a way not entirely explained by self-interest. Asked to add his voice to King’s, the well-connected but alcoholic judge-advocate, Richard Atkins, wrote of Macarthur’s ‘infamous and diabolical conduct, his rapacity in accumulating a large fortune in so short a time, his extortions on the industrious and laborious settler, which has plunged themselves and families into distress and misery, and considerably impeded the happiness and prosperity of this colony . . . unless he is sent Home as a general disturber of the public peace, and as a man who has most essentially injured HM Service, this colony can never enjoy the happiness and prosperity it is HM’s wish that all his subjects should be partakers of.’r />
  Surgeon Thompson was similarly asked to comment. ‘He came here in 1790, more than £500 in debt, and is now worth at least £20 000 . . . His employment during the eleven years he has been here has been that of making a large fortune, helping his brother officers to make small ones, (mostly at the public expense), and sowing discord and strife.’ King himself wrote pungently, ‘Experience has convinced every man in this colony that there are no resources which art, cunning, impudence, and a pair of basilisk eyes can afford that he does not put in practice to obtain any point he undertakes.’

  Macarthur arranged his colonial affairs, concluding by buying a 1700-acre (689-hectare) farm at Toongabbie, and a large flock from Major Foveaux. He left behind, to look after his interest, his wife Elizabeth, the competent, sensible and generous-hearted woman who nonetheless always sided with her husband’s frequently excessive stances. Elizabeth had the pain, too, of saying goodbye to her eight-year-old daughter, also Elizabeth, and son John, a year younger still, who were going to England for an education which would separate them from her for years. They were early examples of a notable minority of Australians being sent to Europe for improvement. The ‘perturbator’ and his youngsters embarked on the Hunter for Calcutta. But in the Celebes (Sulawesi) the Hunter was dismasted in a typhoon which must have terrified the children, and was obliged to shelter at Ambon, where—in a zone considered Dutch—there was a trading post run by young Robert Farquhar on behalf of the British East India Company. Farquhar was about to be demoted for moving with East India Company troops on a nearby Dutch post, a provocative act, but Macarthur advised him to stand up against his superiors, including the Governor-General of India, Lord Wellesley, and insist his actions were justified. When this strategy bore fruit, and the Hunter had been repaired, the young man—who happened to be son to the surgeon and close friend of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV—sent off a letter praising Macarthur to his father, and thus to the prince’s circle, as well as to a number of prominent Whigs. With this—and the parcel of fleeces he had already sent to Sir Joseph Banks—Macarthur had a lever he would use to grand colonial advantage.