Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  THE HIGHWAYMAN PASSES

  D’Arcy Wentworth had made a heavy loss in being the chief partner in the building of the Rum Hospital in Sydney. The task was undertaken by Wentworth, Garnham Blaxcell and Alexander Riley, a close friend of Wentworth’s and, like Blaxcell, a free settler. In return for the construction Macquarie had guaranteed to the partners the right to make a massive importation of rum—205 000 litres— over three years and sell it on whatever terms they chose.

  Given the deal on which it was based, a much criticised hospital was built. But as a result of the experience D’Arcy had become less interested in trade within the colony and more heavily involved in the development of the pastoral industry and the export wool trade. Though his sheep were not merinos, the inflated wool market of England at war had returned him a very good price of 69 pence per pound (454 grams). The enforcement of the East India Company’s monopoly hampered his interests in whaling and sealing, and Governor Macquarie’s port dues threatened to reduce his margin of profit. Then there was a post-war slump in the wool market. But in reality, he flourished.

  D’Arcy continued to serve as superintendent of police on a salary of £300 per annum, and, by one of those purely Australian ironies, he and his police had problems with bushrangers on the Parramatta and Liverpool roads. He was also treasurer of the police fund, but, he pointed out to Bathurst, £100 000 had passed through his hands in the eight years he had held the office without his receiving a penny’s remuneration. Wentworth and Macquarie both recommended D’Arcy’s friend William Redfern to take his place as principal surgeon, but it was not too much of a surprise when Macarthur’s friend, the young surgeon James Bowman, instead received the post. Wentworth felt that Bathurst and his ministry had surrendered to all the guff in Britain about convicts being given public office.

  Wentworth, however, succeeded Captain Piper as president of the Bank of New South Wales in January 1827, and Mr Cookney wrote from London, recommending his son George and his brother-in-law, Mr James, to Wentworth’s protection should they emigrate. The patronage was beginning to run the other way.

  D’Arcy did not take much part in the society of the colony despite his popularity with most men and women he met. He had the grief that his son John, a young naval officer, had perished at sea in 1820, but he had also the joy of possessing an extremely dutiful and active son in William, whose book delighted him. And he was proud of D’Arcy junior having marched through his home town, Portadown, as an officer of the 73rd Regiment. He also willingly supported at least seven other children. Annually he gave a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of his arrival in the colony and he was still involved in horse racing. Gradually he resigned his official positions, which had been such a cause of scandal and outrage in Bennet’s pamphlet. When he died in 1827 the procession from Home Bush to the graveside was said to be a mile long. Convicts had liked him so well that they competed to be assigned to him, which in a way proved Bigge’s thesis that they were not being punished enough.

  His name lay on his Antipodean grave as a challenge to his turbulent eldest son. Avenge this man. Avenge yourself.

  WHO IS CASTLEREAGH, WHO IS SIDMOUTH,

  AND WHO IN GOD’S NAME IS BATHURST?

  In 1782 the executive business regarding colonies was given to the Home Office, but in 1794, when Britain was imperilled by the French, a Secretary of State for the Colonies was appointed. In 1801 the secretary was designated the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and it would not be until 1854 that the two enormous functions were separated.

  As for Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, for whom a New South Wales river of considerable length would be named, he served as a strong servant of repression at home in England, Scotland and Ireland during the Napoleonic era. The viscount was a young and far from unattractive Dublin-born nobleman. When he entered the British Parliament as a twenty-one year old in 1790, Stewart was a Whig who supported electoral reform and Catholic emancipation. By 1795, he crossed the floor to join the Tories, but his position on Irish emancipation and general reform remained the same. His role in quashing the Irish rebellion involved the offer of clemency to commoners who had supported the rebellion, and focusing instead on pursuing rebel leaders. In 1800 he began lobbying in the British and Irish parliament for an official union between the two. His political skills led to the adoption of the Irish Act of Union by both the Irish Parliament and the British, though it instituted two centuries of internecine bloodshed in Ireland.

  In 1804 he was made Secretary of State for War and the Colonies and received and replied to dispatches from Hunter, King and Bligh, arguing for the repression of the interests of the officers but at the same time half-believing their complaints. After Pitt’s Cabinet of All Talents collapsed, he took up the same job under the Duke of Portland’s administration. In this role he became involved in disputes with Foreign Minister George Canning over the failure of the invasion in 1809 of the island of Walcheren. The catastrophe, with thousands dying of camp fever and malaria for no military advantage, certainly distracted Castlereagh from the New South Wales rebellion as Johnston’s self-justifications began to arrive in Downing Street, and led to a duel between Canning and Castlereagh, after which they were forced to resign from cabinet.

  Three years later, however, Castlereagh returned as Foreign Secretary, and hence he represented the United Kingdom at the Congress of Vienna. He was involved in reaction to the ideas of the French revolution along with the uninspiring Home Secretary, Thomas Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, who was the unapologetic scourge of British demonstrators and protesters. As Home Secretary, Sidmouth brutally crushed radical opposition and suspended habeas corpus in 1817, and introduced six vicious acts repressing dissent in 1819 for which Castlereagh was spokesman.

  All of these acts suppressing freedom of speech, the press, assembly and association would produce further trials and further transportations. Indeed, Castlereagh was often called on as Leader of the House of Commons to defend Sidmouth’s policy, and so attracted the moral disgust of Britons. Shelley wrote, concerning the Peterloo protest and massacre of marchers by British soldiers:

  I met murder on the way—he had a face like Castlereagh—

  Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

  Seven bloodhounds followed him,

  All were fat, and well they might

  Be in admirable plight,

  For one by one, and two by two,

  He tossed them human hearts to chew

  Which from his wide cloak he drew.

  At the end of the summer of 1822 he told King George IV that he was being blackmailed. ‘I am accused of the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher,’ he confessed, the said bishop having been discovered in the back room of an inn with his trousers down and in carnal congress with a young soldier. The King advised Castlereagh to ‘consult a physician’. But Castlereagh (now Londonderry through the death of his father) returned to his fine house at Loring Hall in Kent and committed suicide by cutting his throat with a letter knife.

  Byron did not mourn him:

  Posterity will ne’er survey

  A nobler grave than this:

  Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

  Stop, traveller, and piss.

  His funeral on 20 August 1822 was greeted with jeering and insults along the entire processional route.

  Another home executive who had all these turbulent New South Welsh people on his plate was Henry, Third Earl of Bathurst. He had earlier briefly served under Pitt as Secretary of State and had held other important posts. He was born in 1762 and died in 1834, and so was fifty years of age when he took over at the Colonial Office with the Undersecretary Henry Goulburn and was Secretary of State for the Colonies and War in Lord Liverpool’s government from 1812 onwards. These two organised the Colonial Office and made it into a major executive portfolio. They introduced the famous Blue Books, compulsory statistical returns to be filled out by the administration of each colony and returned to England, and set established pra
ctice. Bathurst himself, after whom the first transmontane town in Australia was named, was said to be jocular and self-effacing, but was very efficient and indeed had much to deal with in the climactic years of the Napoleonic Wars. As Secretary of State he was involved in Wellington’s successful conclusion to the Peninsula Campaign.

  He may have been somewhat distracted from Governor Macquarie’s New South Wales by the crisis on Napoleon’s return from Elba, where it had been the decision of the British government to place him. He would be later left to defend the decision to move him to St Helena in the mid-Atlantic after his defeat at Waterloo.

  As well as that, the struggle for the abolition of slavery was in considerable part fought across his desk in the Colonial Office by abolitionists and those in Britain and the plantations of the West Indies who thought slavery had an economic, racial and biblical validity. Other questions such as the removal of ‘the disabilities of Roman Catholics’, of the laws which made it illegal for them to receive a commission in the army and to hold office, beset him as well, and though he was sympathetic to the Irish he would oppose the Reform Bill. How remote, again, must have seemed the roiling arguments of New South Wales! He did receive submissions from Macarthur, pleading that he be permitted to return to New South Wales, and heard from Undersecretary Goulburn (whose name would also grace an inland town) that the matter would be considered if Macarthur admitted the error of the uprising. Macarthur would not do so, and waited for better terms.

  And as a place, short of the noose and available to punish political miscreants, New South Wales remained very much in the minds of government.

  CHAPTER 13

  RADICAL TRANSPORTEES

  Thomas Spence was the apostle of one form of early nineteenth-century radicalism. He was a man driven by Christ’s precepts of the equality of man and the evil of unequal possessions. He had arrived in London from Northumberland in December 1792 and over the next twenty-two years organised small groups which met in local public houses where Spence argued the case that ‘if all the land in Britain were shared out equally, there would be enough to give every man, woman and child seven acres each’. At night, his supporters walked the streets and chalked slogans such as ‘Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies’ and ‘The Land as the People’s Farm’. In the early 1800s the authorities believed that Spence and his followers were responsible for bread riots in London. His disciples buried Spence in September 1814 with his dreams unrequited, and created the Society of Spencean Philanthropists. Again, their meetings took place in public houses, including the Carlisle in Shoreditch, the Cock in Soho, the Pineapple in Lambeth, the White Lion in Camden and the Nag’s Head in Carnaby Market. The government employed a spy to penetrate the Spenceans and he reported to the Home Office in October 1816 that they were planning to overthrow the British government.

  Arthur Thistlewood, the new leader, was convinced a successful revolution was possible, whereas others thought him dangerous and militant. Thistlewood was a former army officer whose improbable design was to take the Tower of London and the Bank of England and thus bring down the government. When nothing came of the plan through lack of support within the society, Thistlewood wrote to ‘the Archfiend’ Lord Sidmouth—the Home Secretary— demanding payment of £180, the cost of three tickets he had purchased to emigrate to America with his wife and child. When Sidmouth failed to answer, Thistlewood challenged him to a duel. Sidmouth had him arrested for threatening a breach of the peace, he was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment at Horsham. Nonetheless, free again, Arthur Thistlewood played an important role in the protest meetings that followed the Peterloo massacre of August 1819, in which a crowd marching in favour of reform and universal suffrage was charged by six hundred Hussars backed by infantry and eighteen marchers were killed. He organised the public reception of Henry Hunt, chief orator of the Peterloo protestors, when he arrived in London after the massacre. The Times estimated that 300 000 people turned up to see Hunt and hear speeches. Hunt, however, tried to distance himself from Thistlewood’s radicalism.

  On 22 February 1820, Thistlewood became aware that several members of the British government were going to dine at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square. With a small group of Spenceans he decided to kill the ministers and assembled in a hayloft in Cato Street. But the Spenceans had been set up by a government spy. Thirteen police officers stormed the loft. Several members of the gang refused to surrender their weapons and one police officer was killed by Thistlewood. Thistlewood and four others were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. They were executed at Newgate Prison on 1 May 1820 before a huge crowd, deep sighs and groans showing that the mob was not utterly at odds with Thistlewood’s plans.

  John Harrison, James Wilson, Richard Bradburn, John Strange and Charles Copper were also found guilty, but their original sentence of execution was transmuted to transportation for life, and they disappeared into the New South Wales penal apparatus, creating less paperwork or comment than the United Irish or Scottish Martyrs. But one wonders what attitudes they imbued their Currency sons and daughters with round the hearth-fire.

  In some cases, Spenceans who informed against their colleagues were allowed to go to transportation rather than hang. What guilt haunted these men in the fields of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales? ‘It is an ancient custom to resist tyranny,’ said one Spencean, William Davidson, in court. ‘. . . would you not rather govern a country of spirited men, than cowards? I can die but once in this world, and the only regret left is that I have a large family of small children, and when I think of that, it unmans me.’

  So did transportation, and the task of finding air within a penal system.

  CURRENCY, NOT STERLING

  The concern of ex-convicts that they and their issue would remain an underclass emerged very early. In a petition addressed to Governor King in 1801, they complained that in the past (and, they feared, the future) they were considered to be convicts attaint, without personal liberty, property rights, without character or credit, without any one right or privilege belonging to free subjects. They signed it not as emancipated convicts but as ‘the emancipated colonists of the territory of New South Wales’.

  But King told the Treasury commissioners in a dispatch that he did not like what he saw of the native-born: ‘Finding the greater part of the children of this colony so much abandoned to every kind of wretchedness and vice, I perceive the absolute necessity of something being attempted to withdraw them from the vicious examples of their abandoned parents.’ Yet this was the generation which by 1820 impressed Commissioner Bigge and others with their probity and calm enterprise. ‘That class of inhabitants who have been born in the colony affords a remarkable exception to the moral and physical character of their parents.’ They began to be called ‘Currency’, after the local coinage. If you were British-born, you were ‘Sterling’, the genuine coin.

  In 1810, Macquarie had written to Secretary of State Bathurst describing the colony as ‘a convict country’. It was a statement of reality. Nine out of ten of the population were convicts, had been convicts, or were the offspring of convicts. Indeed, the free gentlemen were often determined to hold the line. Lieutenant Archibald Bell, when asked by Commissioner Bigge whether he had any objection to admitting convicts into society, gave the reply: ‘I consider them as having once been tainted, unfit to associate with afterwards.’ And many Britons at home felt the same way. The Reverend Sydney Smith wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1819, ‘New South Wales is a sink of wickedness in which the majority of convicts of both sexes become infinitely more depraved than at the period of their arrival . . . no man who has his choice would select it . . . as his dwelling place.’ With a press like this, no wonder British gentlemen with the £250 capital they needed to get a 320-acre (130-hectare) land grant were not yet turning up to take their chances amongst the penal mass.

  Even those who had been born free felt stained by association. James Macarthur told Commissioner Bigge
that, alas, he had been native-born. The few native-born gentlemen could not hold their heads up, he said, because the native-born were generally a mass of the damned, the children of convicts. The young and gifted bushman Hamilton Hume commented that he hoped to lead an expedition ‘altho’ an Australian’, implying that to be a native told against those who wanted command of things.

  Affluent convicts like Henry Kable were in the minority and hoped to consider themselves the middle class of colonial society. It was this group which ultimately had the power to organise and even to send representatives to London to argue their rights. Two of Simeon Lord’s native-born sons, Francis and George, worked from a sense of the rights of the respectable Currency over the pretensions of the arrived-free, and became members of the Legislative Council. By 1828 there were around 1167 Currency men to 1601 Currency women. But they were only the first crop of the tainted tree. Many thousands not yet born would have to negotiate the question of whether their origins should be a matter of spiky pride or lifelong regret and denial. And they would also have to interpret what their convict or free parents said about the world, and about Britain. ‘Nothing induces me to wish for a change but the difficulty of educating our children,’ wrote Elizabeth Macarthur, ‘and were it otherwise, it would be unjust towards them to confine them in so narrow a society.’ The little creatures all spoke of going home to England ‘with rapture’. Like many other native-born, they had ‘early imbibed an idea that England is the seat of happiness and delight; that it contains all that can be gratifying to their senses . . . It would be difficult to un-deceive young people bred up in so secluded a situation, if they had not an opportunity given them of convincing themselves.’